


The Epic Quest of Carcass Vantas

by orphan_account



Series: Blade of the Empire [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alterniastuck, BAMF Gamzee, BAMF John, BAMF Karkat, BAMF Pretty Much Everybody In This Fic, But Heroism Shows Up In Weird Places, Crabdad Is Slightly Insane, Damaged Karkat, F/M, Hemospectrum, Intended Suicide Has Never Been So Entertaining, Just Ask Him, Karkat Is Totally Gonna Die, Karkat Is a Hermit, M/M, Nobody Is Very Nice In This, Threshecutioner Exams, Tons of Violence, and there's fluff, obviously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-16
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-01-12 17:43:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 40,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1193952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's come to this place to die.  He knows there's no hope of surviving, and he's already lost too much to turn back.  The only goal he has left is to take some of these bastards down before he goes.  He promised Crabdad that much.<br/>His name is Karkat Vantas, and these are the threshecutioner trials.<br/>His name is Karkat Vantas, and this is the reason he fights.<br/>If only it were simpler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Stand Over the World

The first day of tryouts, Karkat was—as usual—all by himself, glaring at things. He’d found a perch on top of one of the Condesce’s ridiculously huge fifty foot statues where he felt taller than everybody else and taken his weapons with him in case someone decided to bring the sparring to him. Now the troll was staring down at the practice field where he was supposed to be, waiting for the next person to get stabbed.  
  
What he was supposed to do down there for an hour that couldn’t be accomplished elsewhere was a big fucking mystery to Karkat’s Vantas. He’d been sharpening his sickles, but he was already bored with this and was mostly glaring at things because: 1) that featherbeast looked like it was contemplating pooping on him, and 2) he was going to die soon and it was all his lusus’s fault.  
  
He was perfectly happy ruminating on these facts and hating everything, but unfortunately for Karkat, somebody was making a huge racket below him.  
  
Offended and curious (mostly offended) Karkat peered over the edge of the Condescension’s diadem and saw a distant bluish blob crawling across the sheer stone face. The scaling was being conducted at an impressive rate. Karkat conceded with some reluctance that those were some sharp claws Bluebell was using. He wasted a few seconds staring morosely at his own—trimmed short at his lusus’s insistence—and then climbed to his feet to go back down the way he came. He had no intention of actually engaging in strife. There were other statues.  
  
But because it was his life, somehow a gust of wind managed to upset his sickles as he stood. Swearing, Karkat leapt after the weapon as it skittered over the stone. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck, it slipped just out of his fingers and down the edge of the statue. Right at the unsuspecting climber. Karkat watched it go in silent, shocked horror, hands flattened to the sides of his face like he possessed the strength to smash his own skull and be done with this miserable excuse for an existence.  
  
A pale gray arm lashed out—fuck, what was this dude, an albino? He looked like the shadow of a pure white ceramic—and snatched Karkat’s sickle out of the air with perfect, easy accuracy. Karkat blinked. Abruptly, there was a troll staring at him, more bemused than outright offended. About all Karkat registered was that this troll had pretty big horns for such a skinny guy.  
  
And then Karkat was throwing himself backwards, prepared to sprint down the statue by free fall, if necessary, to avoid finding out what happened when you got caught chucking your weapon’s at people’s heads.  
  
Midway down, he was overtaken. His arm was stuck in a stranger’s grip, his sickle was nowhere to be seen, and Karkat, holding his other sickle between his teeth, narrowed his eyes and tried to look menacing. This got him blinked at.  
  
Strike out #695, Karkat Vantas. Oh look, another banner sweep for your record.  
  
The stranger blinked, glancing down at what Karkat’s was balanced on—laughed. Karkat’s ears pricked up at the sound. Troll laughing. Ugh, weird. It sounded like it did on TV, like a dying cudbeast. It was unsettling to hear in person, but not quite as fear-inducing as Karkat had assumed.  
  
“Wow, neat!” The troll exclaimed, lips drawing back into a wide, razor-sharp grin. “You found a way up by _walking_ —? Oh, I get it! On the folds of her dress, right? Could you walk all the way to the top?” Karkat, ears still pricked and the rest of him balled up as tight as he could manage in case he was going to have to take an active role in his last few hours of survival, managed a nod. The other troll laughed again. “I had no idea you could do that! How did you figure it out?”  
  
Boredom. Free time. Antisociality. And a whoooole lot of survival training. Karkat shrugged.  
  
“I bet somebody must have told you,” the new troll decided when all Karkat did was stare at him. “But that’s still really cool! I’ve never seen anyone do that. I’ve never seen anyone up here at all, and then I saw you and it looked fun to try! You’re one of the new guys, right? Here to take the threshecutioner exam?”  
  
…Did he just say that all in one breath?  
  
Karkat’s ears flicked back, and then jumped back to attention. Ugh, spaz much. He scowled, kneading at one of them with a claw as he eyed the troll boy. …What the fuck was he supposed to do in this situation? They’d never covered, you know. People actually coming up to Karkat and talking to him. Well, without wanting to kill him on sight, anyway.  
  
This, Karkat figured, was what movies were for. He cleared his throat, squaring his shoulders to look a little more formidable. After a moment’s confusion, he also grabbed the sickle out of his mouth. “Y—“ Oh, _fuck_ that. A little more mangrit, if you please. Karkat lowered his voice an octave or two before trying again. “Yeah. You too?”  
  
“Guess again!” The troll grinned and tilted his head. Karkat observed this. He summarily decided that it would make anyone who attempted it look like a moron, not just this guy. This was no reason to reserve judgment. “Nope, but you know what’s great? Being employed!”  
  
Yeah, as what, a janito—wait, did this little fucker just get snide with him?  
  
Oh _hell_ to the no.  
  
The troll was still talking. “I just have some friends taking the exam. I’m moral support! Supportively, I’d better warn you not to get in their way.” He jangled Karkat’s arm a little as he said this. Karkat reflexively dug his heels into the stone in case the stranger was preparing to throw him off the rock. Didn’t happen. “You couldn’t pay me to mess with Jane anyway, so I guess if you see her coming you should just hide? No offense, little dude, but you’re pretty spindly. Are you sure you’re old enough to be here?”  
  
Karkat ground his teeth together. The top of his head came up to this troll’s solar plexus. That would be a good place to aim force.  
  
One of them clearly had to die.  
  
“So I’m John,” the asshole said, as though he had not just flagrantly insulted the boy glowering at his chin. John did something complicated with their hands that somehow ended with Karkat’s clammy fingers clasping his own and Karkat feeling slightly violated. The asshole grinned, and shook their hands daintily, like they were trapped in a period drama. “Good to meet you, statue dude! What’s your name?”  
  
The tremendous shitstain bent down to ask that, hands on his knees, all aww, look at the widdle midget-child. What was he trying to do, commune with Karkat’s toes? More importantly, Karkat’s personal space: breached as everfuck. Deploy evasive action.  
  
_Kill the motherfucker._  
  
John’s eyes seemed to widen a fraction, but that was all he had time for. Karkat’s leg snapped up with a _whhap_ of fabric and smashed into the troll’s patronizing fucking jaw. The force in it toppled the bigger troll. As predicted, he dropped right off the edge of the statue and out of sight.  
  
Karkat gasped, jolting— _shit._ One less troll on Alternia. Was this going to be his first…?  
  
Oh man. Why’d he have to have done that on _instinct?_ Where was his glory, dammit? And fuck that dumbass too; who starts trying to antagonize strangers in elevated areas? Karkat had just done the world a favor. Those genetics were effectively silenced.  
  
Karkat inched towards the edge of the statue, ears flattened to his skull. He looked down.  
  
“Huh?” Karkat murmured, brow wrinkling. Below was a stretch of tan clay and a few uninteresting rocks. It was lacking in certain elements.  
  
“That wasn’t too nice,” the troll observed from behind him.  
  
Karkat swore, and tried to leap off the edge of the statue. Maybe a six foot drop and then he’d hit another stable walkway. He could outsprint whatever the fuck this was—how did this guy get his claws into the stone to stop his fall? Karkat had knocked him back _hard!_ And how the HELL did he get back up here without Karkat noticing?!  
  
“Nope,” the John observed, and Karkat gagged slightly as a handful of his shirt was snatched up, holding him away from the edge. “No quick death for you. Really, statue guy, where’s your sense of imperial pride?”  
  
Of all the things he could have said, that one was the most effective. Karkat twisted his head around, fuming, sweating, and John was grinning at him.  
  
Grinning. Not smirking or doing that happy snarling face Karkat practiced in front of the mirror for when he inevitably got to command his own army of war-hungry forces, just like _In Which an Unsightly Lowblood Successfully Fosters Rebellion Against His Treasonous Pacifistic Betters._  
  
A wide, gleaming smile. It was comparable to having the magnificent edifice of Karkat’s rage egged. As Karkat stared, the bigger troll tugged at his collar. Karkat stumbled away from the edge.  
  
Yes, Karkat determined, this was definitely weird. In part because John’s feet weren’t touching the statue at all.  
  
Karkat stared, wide-eyed, as the troll let him go and sort of… blew a foot or so away. He was reclining in midair, grinning cockily, letting Karkat take in the sights. It was… magic? Karkat had thought that was a rumor. Something pretend that ThornyLignous came up with to increase their movie sales—something for wrigglers and the delusional. But right in front of Karkat, it looked like a fact of life that had always been there, waiting for someone to show off to.  
  
“Like what you see?” John observed, giggling. Not even hostile. His chin was kind of grayish and Karkat hit hard. This did not make any sense whatsoever.  
  
“I just pushed you,” Karkat pointed out slowly. “I was trying to kill you.” This guy was bigger than him, and even disregarding the claws— _magic,_ Karkat recalled, _is some scary shit._ The attempted murder = dead Karkat equation didn’t tabulate any other way. Even without having started this by dropping a bladed weapon on John’s face.  
  
Basically, he didn’t trust that smile beyond how many pointed fangs it was showing. Karkat was a wary troll. He had maybe three days of life left, and he refused to waste them by getting stabbed to death on the Condesce’s—pause to check—rumble sphere.  
  
Yes. This was of course where he’d ended up standing. Karkat’s life could just go suck syphilitic, shit-encrusted bulge, as far as Karkat was concerned.  
  
John’s whole body drew into a line of tension that showcased cords of muscle made otherwise invisible under that baggy shirt. Karkat stared—shit, were all trolls out here built like that? What did he do, masonrending? Yeah, that combined with the needle sharpness of John’s claws and the scissor snap of his teeth when his mouth opened—all good reasons not to fuck with him. _Alert, alert, danger._ Karkat’s weight dropped to his heels, about to twist himself to the edge and drop. Back to gravity; that was his best shot at defending against this kind of magic. Maneuverability.  
  
He was NOT going to fucking die before his time, goddammit!  
  
“Oh yeah! I almost forgot with all that snap kicking stuff,” John exclaimed brightly, dropping his attention away from Karkat entirely to fish around in his captchalogue modus. Karkat stared, tensed to shit, and prepared to leap. “You know, that was a pretty good hit!” John observed cheerfully as he looked for… what? Torture implements? “You don’t look like much, statue guy, but you could take somebody’s head off with that! Guess I don’t need to warn you after all. You’re just a pocket-sized badass. Badass mini.”  
  
Karkat observed John’s modus instead of attempting to fathom of the words coming out of his mouth. It… looked pretty shitty. Huh. Wizards used shitty modii too; who knew?  
  
“Anyway, here,” John said, producing Karkat’s beat-up old sickle. He beamed as he held it out, looking for all the world like ill will was the fever dream of an agoraphobic old crab lusus hiding in the middle of a wasteland. Karkat was almost tempted to believe that smile. “This is what you dropped, right? All yours. No hard feelings, okay?”  
  
Oh yes. The magic troll with scythes for claws and musculature that deserved a fucking poem, was just ever so kindly holding out Karkat’s weapon, right over a sheer thirty foot drop that Karkat had previously attempted to murder him with. That made perfect sense. Maybe next they could paint all the daisies together.  
  
If he so much as twitched into range, he’d find his throat slit faster than he could raise his middle finger. That was saying something. Karkat had some mighty fine bird-flipping skills. Fastest fingers in the, er, city-state he’d never set foot outside of until a week ago. Once again, please direct a hearty fuck you to his life.  
  
John wiggled the sickle in midair. Something about his smile, now that he wasn’t delivering diatribes of thinly-veiled insults made Karkat’s stomach flop. His eyes darted to the sickle, gleaming temptingly. He didn’t have a spare. Well, he could probably fight just fine with one and all. Not that it would matter. He was dogmeat, and he knew it. But. He’d had those dumbass sickles since he was six sweeps old.  
  
…They were from Crabdad.  
  
Did Karkat even need his hand that badly? Nope. The answer was nope. So he crouched, baring his teeth warningly and lifting his own sickle. “Don’t try anything funny, or you’re dead.” His throwing aim was shit. No one needed to know that.  
  
John’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t move, not even to reply. Therefore, Karkat didn’t pounce on him. Instead, still rumbling a low note of warning, Karkat prowled nearer, keeping his side towards the enemy to present the smallest target possible. When he was close enough to really be sweating it, Karkat swiped quickly at the handle of the blade and then skittered backwards as quickly as possible.  
  
And:  
  
He ended up holding two sickles. He had not been stabbed. He wondered if John had used magic to catch the sickle before it hit him and if that’s why it was tingling up his arm.  
  
John had flicked his forehead before he went, and that was all. “Gotcha,” the troll said, and snickered.  
  
It was a little disappointing, when you hated yourself as much as Karkat did. Still standing on the Condesce’s boob—which was, all things considered, better than John, who was magicking himself in front of said boob like it needed approaching, and giving Karkat a smirk that Karkat didn’t know how to decipher. He wasn’t willing to get back within range of John’s claws, but he managed to jerk a nod. “Uh. Thanks.”  
  
Shit! He’d forgotten to deepen his voice! Fuck, he sounded like a terrified squeakbeast, didn’t he.  
  
John burst out laughing. Suspicions: confirmed. Karkat glared at him, lips pulled back to show that his teeth, while not as diabolical as this guy’s, were still good to go in the whole neck-rending business. John laughed harder, an arm wrapped around his waist as he doubled into the rock. “Wow!” He giggled. “You’re kind of funny, huh? Well, whatever. It’s been real statue guy! Try not to push anyone who can’t fly to their unceremonious doom. I’ll see you around!”  
  
And then he was gone, shooting away from the statue like underwear caught in the breeze. Karkat’s jaw dropped as he stared. John. Just. Wow. He moved like he was swimming through the air. How could anything be that graceful? Magic didn’t even look like that in the movies. Scratch that, how could anything that graceful be such an asshat.  
  
Karkat imagined that fluid speed flying at him, weapon in hand.  
  
He shivered, fingers curling tighter over the handles of his sickles. Unbidden, his ears twitched towards John, who aimed for the center of the training ground and landed in a plume of dust and indignant shrieks. He dashed at some girl like he would strife with her—and threw his arms around her neck. Karkat’s ears picked up a few of those clomping footsteps (John moved like he was trying to bulldoze with his ankles) before he flicked his ear up to put an end to it. JEGUS. Damned spastic appendages.  
  
Why the fuck should he care, anyway.


	2. Fleeting Insanity

Karkat stumbled back, straining to get his heavy arms up—fucking up!—fast enough. He was a half-second too slow to truly deflect the drone’s claws sweeping down on him, and the blow made his shoulders howl. Well, that was at least one muscle strained. Snarling, Karkat dropped below the attack and drove his sickles up. His weapons dug into the metal carapace of his opponent, gouging deep and sticking—fucking shoulders, again; why was he so weak—and Karkat’s brain went cloudy with anger. He fucking. Was not. Going to fall back a- _fucking_ -gain!  
  
So he roared like a complete imbecile, trouncing any actual strategy in favor of sinking his weight to his heels and slamming upwards with his injured shoulders like he could not be bothered to give a fuck. The blades refused move; shit, he’d probably—but no, HA, the drone’s armor screeched and gave way to six sweeps-worth of carefully cultivated muscles. Karkat hacked a chunk of carapace free, leaving it hanging like an autumn leaf.  
  
He got lucky deflecting the next two attacks jabbing at his head. He lunged his sickles towards the nice, interesting hole he’d made to see what sort of wiring he could bust, Imperial property be damned. He just wanted to kill something, goddammit, and have it be dead and lying there so he could see it before someone culled _him_. Even if it was a fucking drone. Or rather, _especially_ if it was a fucking drone.  
  
But that STUPID FUCKING PIECE OF HOOFBEAST SHIT GONG rang out before he could deal his death blow. Obediently, the drone jolted into military formation, shutting down with a whine. Karkat’s sickle stalled a half-inch from the tempting gap in the machine’s armor. It was his. He’d _earned_ it. And while he was armed, he’d sure as shit like to see somebody try to stop him from fucking up at least one bipedal shithead.  
  
Commander Zahhak’s voice boomed through the air before Karkat could work up the guts to drive his blade home. “Prospective Vantas!” He snapped at the younger troll. Karkat tilted his head up to give the commander a viciously mutinous look. Zahhak was a highblood, an asshole, and—as Karkat had grown familiar enough with his stint of troll culture to declare—his hair was stupid. Karkat felt beholden to him exactly not at all. It was a toss-up who he’d prefer to thoroughly gut, Zahhak or the stupid motherfucking drone he’d been pitted against since sunset.  
  
Zahhak snarled from the high platform over the battle cells, and paced out of his chair like he was going to leap down and take the robot’s place after all. Not that he needed to, the showy bastard. Zahhak was high enough on the hemospectrum to be able to use the highblood growl, and Karkat’s complete isolation from trollkind had ended eight days ago. He had no resistance to the hypnotic compulsion he heard in Zahhak’s snarling. The sound made his head buzz with dizziness until his vision fragmented apart. Karkat reeled back from the robot, panting, dropping a sickle to clutch at his head. Ughh, oh god, he couldn’t tell which way was up.  
  
Zahhak seemed satisfied with Karkat’s behavior now, and addressed the whole network of cells—stretched out about twenty yards underneath the observer platform like a contorted honeycomb—in his booming tones. “Prospectives, congratulations on your superior performances!” He announced. “To those who have survived today’s trial, you have each earned the privilege to stand trial tomorrow, beginning at first nightbreak! You are one step closer to the sweetness of victory and the honor of standing among the great threshecutioners! Let loose your howls of triumph!!”  
  
It wasn’t much of a speech, but no one had come here to talk. All around Karkat’s cell, troll voices rose up in a throbbing chorus. Too many voices to count, each exhausted and filled with incorruptible fury and pride. It was the kind of sound that would have made all enemies of the Empire flee to hide under their recupercoons. It was the sound of hell. And Karkat, hand still squashed to the side of his head, was busy throwing up and trying to aim away from his shoes.  
  
“Dismissed!” Zahhak roared when the last snarls (and retching) had died away. Karkat’s vision stopped swimming and he managed to blink the world back into focus by growling at the blurs and thumping a fist against his temple a few times. There you go, perfectly serviceable, if a little shaky around the edges. And the middle—but screw it, he could see movement. He was fine.  
  
Once Karkat had put together a general understanding of where he was (and the fact that for once life wasn’t fucking with him and he’d indeed missed his shoes), Karkat picked up his fallen sickle and slotted both blades back into his belt. He didn’t miss the angry twinge in his shoulders, and winced. That had been pretty dumb, losing his temper against the drone like that. Was he even going to be able to put up a fight tomorrow?  
  
Yes, he intended to see the trials though. This was going to sound stupid, but Karkat wanted to have high command begging to take him before this was all said and done. Sure, he’d die messy whether he got offed in a battle cell or an official hall, but he was going to die either way, right? Might as well use his death to give them a hearty fuck you. Karkat was going to hold his chin up when it happened, and know that they were killing him for something stupider than words could convey, when they’d have had the loyalist of soldiers if any single one of them would just entertain the thought that _maybe_ it would have been okay if he hadn’t had to die.  
  
Plus, Karkat was still the same moron who had religiously watched every single movie about threshecutioners that he could get his claws on. Least constructive idolization ever, but he’d been dreaming of these trials since before he could hold a sickle.  
  
Enough of that crap. Look, if Karkat stayed in the running, he’d have a second go and ending C3PO over here; that was more than enough. As he passed the drone, Karkat snagged a wire sticking out of the hole he’d made in the drone’s armor. Tugged. It snapped off in his fingers in a little spasm of sparks. Karkat smirked and let it fall before he limped off in search of some of those little healing wassits he couldn’t remember the name of.  
  
He did not realize that he was on camera, but there was a lot Karkat wasn’t realizing these days.

\----

After one hour of picking grasses on a windswept hillock, Karkat was exhausted beyond belief.  
  
His vision had never cleared, and more pressingly, all that adrenaline he’d been flooding himself with for ten hours straight of nonstop fighting? Yeah, that had been cycled out and replaced with each of his individual muscles screaming at him and shaking all over the place. He still had a little bit of battle fever over him in spite of this—yes, perfect. Just what he needed. A flood of aggression hormones, a hopped up metabolism, and his color vision going to shit, but without the adrenaline and endorphins necessary to keep him from feeling like he was about to combust. Fuck his biology. Fuck it to the moon, sideways, and then fuck it straight back down again. Nobody else had to deal with this shit.  
  
On the positive side, Karkat had remembered what herb he was supposed to be looking for. He’d used to hoard rubyleaf weed religiously because it was about the only thing that would patch him up fast enough to endure Crabdad’s next rampage during molting season.  
  
Today, possibly because he was having difficulty seeing past a distance of three feet, Karkat had some of stickyback fern for chewing—the constant complaints of his muscles were accordingly numbed, while Karkat’s mouth tasted like a rotten garbage canister—but no goddamned rubyleaf. The stuff had grown _everywhere_ around his hive. You couldn’t so much as open a window without letting in a cloud of greasy gray pollen. But no, because Karkat Vantas lived a shitty life, the hills around the Royal Complex couldn’t muster up a single sprig of the damn weed, just a whole bunch of moondaisies.  
  
Karkat’s current feelings towards moondaisies could be explained by the noise a woodchipper made when you tried to feed a whole bunch of blaring alarm clocks through it.  
  
He was ready to call it quits and haul himself back inside the palace walls because clearly he wasn’t finding shit. He’d look for someplace quiet to sleep (but not the barrack they’d loaded him into; Karkat had learned that lesson the hard way). Really, fuck everything. He was going to die anyway. For three days now, he hadn’t had anything in his mouth except the ferns—which he had no desire to ever swallow, ever—and he was starving after fighting for so long. He wanted to kick something, this fever was cooking him alive and honestly, Karkat’s thought process was no longer capable of extending beyond the immediacy of feeling horrible all over. His oversensitive hearing picked up a rustling from behind him and he leapt at it without thinking.  
  
Thankfully, he was also stupid enough to forget his damn sickles, so all he ended up doing was head-butting the troll trying to sneak up behind him, instead of adding murder to his list of punishable offenses such as: being alive. Drawing breath. Occasionally moving.  
  
He hit the ground hard enough to clear his head for a few seconds. The growl in his throat faltered.  
  
As Karkat blinked, keeping his victim pinned to the grass with claws around his neck, he determined that this guy was unarmed. Also, Karkat was being gaped at with one of those horror film stares, like Karkat was a feral troll. Admittedly, he was kind of acting less than stable.  
  
Not that acting paranoid was unjustified. Again: see barracks experience. Not pretty.  
  
“ _Nggrak_ ,” Karkat hissed, and then coughed. Ugh, he’d swallowed the stickyback. Gross. Try again. He squinted down. He couldn't see clearly enough to be sure, but he kind of thought... "John?”  
  
“Hey,” John said slowly, voice making Karkat's ears lift. The troll boy raised one of his ridiculously clawed hands. “Uh. Do you always greet people this way? You might want to work on that.”  
  
For a moment, all Karkat was capable of were perfectly justifiable suspicions, like John stalking him, or there being an army of John clones roosting in the skies above the Royal Complex.  
  
Then he grimaced, and struggled to convince his limbs that no really, John hadn’t done anything to merit death. Also, anyone dumb enough to sneak up on a troll who’d been fighting so recently—and then get _pinned_ —probably wasn’t immediately dangerous. Fuck magic, Karkat was too tired to think about it. He rolled off.  
  
John got up, faster than Karkat could have if he was in decent fighting shape. Faster than he’d seen anyone move, ever. John smiled while Karkat bristled, drawing in on himself. So, that theory about this guy not being that dangerous? No doubt about that.  
  
John extended a hand to him. “Here,” he said.  
  
Aw fuck, Karkat was tired. Why the hell not.  
  
He let the other troll yank him upright, and tensed halfway up in expectation of a knee slamming into his stomach or claws gouging at his face. But instead, _again,_ Karkat tottered away on shaky legs, unharmed, and unsettled because of it. “Um, not trying to start anything, buuut,” John was peering at him. “You don’t look too good. You kind of look like someone dribbled you up and down the basketbreaker court for a scrimmage.” John winced as Karkat blinked his eyes. Everything was spinning. If he was going to throw up, he was going to aim at John. “Shit. Are you still all battle-happy?”  
  
‘Happy’ was not a term Karkat would use. He rasped a laugh, and flexed his shaking fingers, trying to stop the tremors from climbing any higher on his arms. “Not exactly,” he said. He eyed John. He had no reason to trust this troll, but Karkat was also out of options. He needed to be resting if he was going to stand a chance tomorrow. “Know if there’s any rubyleaf around here?” At John’s bemused expression, Karkat groaned. Figured. “Looks like a really stringy weed, gray spores all over it except the bottoms of the leaves? Red? Stinks weirdly like peanut butter?”  
  
John’s mouth was set in a frown. “Uh, no? I’m not really a botany expert, though.” Karkat exhaled, taking the news like a punch to the gut. Fuck. It had been hours—he really wasn’t finding it, was he? Actually, he’d be lucky to find his way back inside. More than likely, Karkat was spending the night out here, with the wildchomps and the horrorterrors. Pleasant. John shuffled a little closer, which snapped Karkat’s attention back to him and his weirdly non-threatening frown. “Hey, should you really be picking flowers right now? You look like you could use some rest. Hard day in the cells, right?”  
  
Karkat ignored the question. He glared up at John, wanting very much to sit down and close his eyes until the spinning stopped. Either his fever was going down, or his bloodpusher was failing. Didn’t matter, darkness was crawling in from the corners of his vision. “What’s wrong with your face?” He muttered.  
  
“Uh?” John blinked at him. “Nothing. Yours is much more hideous. Come on, banter aside, you’re kind of worrying me.” Karkat snorted.  
  
“Worry doesn’t look like that,” he informed John, feeling sage and worldly because he’d seen through the other troll’s clever plan. Never mind that Karkat didn’t know what worry looked like. Never mind that he didn’t have the faintest clue what John’s clever plan was. Uuugh, he wanted to lay down for a minute. He found himself groaning, “I need some rubyleaf to speed up the healing process.”  
  
He proceeded directly to slapping a hand over his eyes. His skull tried to invert itself. _Good,_ Karkat thought viciously.  
  
Why did Karkat decide to volunteer this information to the weird-ass troll who could probably stab out his eyes before Karkat could coordinate his wobbling limbs? This was what was called ‘Begging to be Culled.’ Study it well, boys and girls, and do not follow in Mr. You Are a Fucking Moron Vantas’s example.  
  
“Home remedy, huh?” John sounded sympathetic. “You might be out of luck. I mean, can you even take plant matter into the sopor?” He paused. “Cause that would be pretty cool, if it didn’t turn you into some kind of freaky plant hybrid! But anyway, there’s always accelerant supplements and you’ll probably be fine.”  
  
Accelerant supplements? Sopor? Karkat squinted at John. He had not the faintest clue what the other troll was talking about. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. “Rubyleaf,” he muttered again, tiredly.  
  
“Okaaaay,” John raised his eyebrows. He leaned closer abruptly. Karkat blinked at the troll’s nose.  
  
A half-second afterwards Karkat managed to reel backwards enough to recover his personal space. John snorted. “Yeah, I think we need to get you back inside. I’ll take you down to the infirmary and get you looked at.”  
  
“Wazzat,” Karkat grumbled, but his voice was probably too soft to hear. He managed to flinch back in time to avoid John’s grabby hands—seriously, what was with that? He’d grabbed Karkat last time too. That was him. John McGrabbyNubs. Karkat attempted to growl, but got kind of confused about how to move his lips.  
  
This was not optimal fighting condition, Karkat supposed.  
  
John sighed and beckoned. After a moment’s consideration, Karkat stumbled after the strange troll. Call it insanity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ughbghhbztt, and that is really all I have to say on the matter.  
> I like this story, and I will post it to the end, even if you all hate me.  
> Farewell!


	3. Kinetic Momentum Build

“So, you took a cell today,” John said. He glanced briefly behind him as he did, darting back away as soon as he met Karkat’s eyes. Karkat’s lip curled. If this troll was expecting not to be watched, this was going to be a disappointing experience. Karkat refused to be fucked with—shit, he was listing towards that wall. Correct—no, the other way—which way were his feet?  
  
John McGrabbyNubs gripped Karkat’s shoulder before he could bash his head into the wall and steered him straight again. He had a look on his face like he was trying not to laugh. “I swung by the cells today—I am the master of support and friendship, it’s totally me—and just _happened_ to see you fighting. Good job not dying! And your form was pretty great too. I’ve never seen anything like it. Where did you study?”  
  
“Lusus,” Karkat admitted, startled into honesty. John could tell the difference between individual fighting styles? Karkat was dying to ask about the others—how did most trolls learn? Did they really get sent to private ninja academies in the mountains like in _Threshman Begins?_ Did their lusii beat them senseless on a daily basis too, or was that a joy particular to Karkat’s living arrangements?  
  
John started at him for a longer span of time, meeting Karkat’s eyes. “Your lusus taught you to _fight?_ Are you kidding me?” His voice was soft with curiosity. Even as tired as he was, Karkat’s ears flicked at the new sound. He’d never heard a troll voice sounding so… pleasant.  
  
“Whoa,” John whispered as he tugged Karkat away from yet another wall. Karkat stumbled dizzily against him. “You’re not kidding? So that’s awesome. What kind of lusus did you have, for them to be able to schoolfeed you?”  
  
“Cr,” Karkat began tiredly, before he gave himself a rousing mental bitch slap and managed to say, “—Crocpop.”  
  
John blinked. “Really? I’ve never heard of a crocodile lusus schoolfeeding its wriggler.”  
  
Karkat shrugged, uncomfortable with the topic. More specifically, uncomfortable with how much he was liable to let slip with his brains turning to soup in his skull. “The more you know,” he grumbled sarcastically, waggling his fingers like the television infomercials about how to know you were about to molt, or six ways to pick a mutant out of a crowd.  
  
John surprised him with his laugh—Jegus fuck, that was loud! How much had John lowered his voice?  
  
The other troll shot him a guilty look, clapping a hand over his mouth. “Sorry,” he mumbled, voice dropping soft again. Karkat just gaped at him. What… What the hell was this? He’d noticed that Karkat couldn’t handle loud sounds right now? And that somehow inclined him to treat Karkat carefully.  
  
This was just making his thinkpan hurt more. That was John’s strategy, right? It had to be.  
  
“What gives?” Karkat asked, more puzzled than actively hostile. “It’s like you’re nice.”  
  
John giggled, softer now, although his eyes sparkled with all the saved up sound. Karkat’s ears strained closer, fascinated. “Aww, that’s pretty mean. Most people think I’m _actually_ nice.”  
  
Karkat reshaped his question. “Okay, why are you fawning over me? What do you… want?”  
  
So far trolls hadn’t been all that hard to figure out. They all had a central desire, and everything else branched off of that. It was just a matter of figuring out what made them tick. Karkat’s fellow prospectives in the barracks wanted to pick off the weaklings. Zahhak wanted to wield power and lord it over people. The Condesce wanted to kill everything that didn’t fit nicely in its box.  
  
John wanted… to grab Karkat a lot? What the fuck.  
  
John just grinned at him. “I want to be friends,” he said. He nodded at Karkat. “You’re pretty interesting, for a doofus.”  
  
Karkat thought about the next forty-eight hours and cracked a smile down at his shoes. “I’m really not,” he murmured.  
  
“Are too,” the other troll argued. “You’re a total head case and it’s awesome!” John led Karkat to a door—Karkat was just coherent enough to see that it wasn’t the barracks door and feel vaguely relieved—and he shoved it open to a blinding shock of artificial light. John’s voice drifted into Karkat’s ears while Karkat tucked his head down as low as it would go and pressed his thick sweater sleeve to his eyes in case they started tearing up. Didn’t feel like they were, but fuck! Give a guy a little warning, would you? “It’s entertaining— _you’re_ entertaining. You stick out like a nail that hasn’t been hammered down.”  
  
That sounded dumb. Karkat hadn’t done anything. Well, unless there were laws against climbing up the Condesce’s boob.  
  
Come to think of it, there probably were.  
  
Once reassured that his eyes weren’t going to cause him any problems, Karkat squinted into the light. A row of those weird slime pods lined the walls on both sides and Karkat stared at them nervously. Once had been enough for him, thanks. He still didn’t know what those were—but at first he’d just climbed into them like everyone else, trying to play along. The slimy stuff inside had felt cool and kind of relaxing (if really fucking weird). It had been almost pleasant?  
  
Until a party of four trolls had held him down under the slime and tried to drown him. Fucking barracks. Karkat wasn’t heading back there, and he wasn’t getting near those pods. He’d seen at least three other victims, face-down and limp in the slime. He wasn’t ending up like that. He’d die breathing.  
  
He’d stopped moving. John tugged his arm and Karkat reluctantly shuffled after him. “So you’re some kind of authority on not fitting in?” He saw a few trolls reclined in the pods, but they looked unconscious, not dead. Karkat shivered anyway, and fixed his attention on the startlingly pale color of John’s hand and wrist. “You worked here long, or are you just arrogant?”  
  
“Yeah? Kind of both?” John’s voice was light. Karkat narrowed his eyes. Karkat kept letting things slip, but all he know about this John troll was that he could fly. John was good at making it sound like he’d answered a question without really saying anything at all. It made Karkat’s neck prickle with unease. Who pulled this kind of shit?  
  
I mean, Karkat _tried._ But who’d need to do that, if they weren’t slated for an early death?  
  
“I didn’t catch your name,” John said, glancing back at Karkat with the same silly smile, that just begged to be thought of as harmless. All those teeth. He wasn’t fucking harmless at all. Karkat growled in the back his throat. “I missed the opening ceremonies. Tell me who you are—someone should be cheering for you tomorrow.”  
  
Karkat’s brow wrinkled up. “No.” Distress pitched his tone sharper. He didn’t want a troll cheering for him. “Who says I’ll survive tomorrow anyway?” Not like he’d found so much as a sprig of rubyleaf. Who the fuck was he kidding—there was no way he’d survive tomorrow.  
  
“If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine,” John told him brightly, and winked. “I’ll just bug someone until they tell me.” Karkat bared his teeth at John. _Do it, and I’ll stick you with these._ It just made John laugh again.  
  
John towed him over to a troll surrounded by fluttering lusii—flutterbugs, it looked like, only some of them had the faces of little cows. Karkat was instantly hypnotized. They were just so small! “This guy’s one of the prospective threshecutioners,” John informed the unfamiliar troll in their midst—Karkat watched the interaction, puzzled. This troll was acting like seeing John cheered him up. He even smiled hopefully over at Karkat (though that expression died a chilly death when all Karkat did was snarl until those ganderbulbs were redirected).  
  
...Were they in a quadrant?  
  
John said, “And I see that you’re looking flighty as ever.” For some reason, this made the other troll laugh. Too loud—John shushed him, throwing Karkat an apologetic look. Karkat’s ears had flattened themselves. John and this other guy were grinning at each other, looking totally relaxed.  
  
It was like they weren’t even _trolls_. Karkat peered at John.  
  
“He’ll need a basic patch-up job, I guess?” The unidentified troll said a little more quietly, giving Karkat an abrupt once over, too quick for Karkat to work up a decent growl. Without waiting for an answer, the stranger beckoned, heading towards one of the empty slime pods. Karkat wrinkled his nose at it, and stopped short a foot or two away. John parked himself at Karkat’s elbow, humming under his breath.  
  
Karkat watched curiously as the stranger added pink capsules to the slime and stirred at it with a big metal rod. The color of the slime changed—so did its smell. Karkat sniffed the air, trying to place it, and felt John lightly touch his shoulder, steadying him.  
  
John smiled innocently when Karkat glared. His hand stayed put. The other troll took his metal stick out of the water.  
  
“Go ahead and get in,” he suggested with a professional smile. “It’ll get you feeling better in no time. You’ll be good as new tomorrow morning!”  
  
Karkat severely doubted that. He glared at the pod, unwilling. He wasn’t going to be able to keep conscious if he stayed still. He’d be the easiest fucking target in the world. And he still didn’t understand why he was supposed to get in a slime bath. No one had explained it to him.  
  
“It’s okay,” the troll told him, like he could sense Karkat’s anxieties. Perhaps because Karkat, in contemplation of the pod, had begun snarling at it and flexing his claws. He supposed it’d be a lot harder to drown in there if he took a few chunks out of it and let all the slime out. The stranger informed him, “We have the best security in the fortress. No one gets up to anything funny in the infirmary.”  
  
Like Karkat trusted him. His job was probably to smile at people and get as many as possible into these pods, then coordinate all those fucking lusii to do synchronized drowning.  
  
_Go find a supply closet to hide in until daybreak or something,_ Karkat’s common sense directed. _Make a pile, lick your wounds, and maybe a miracle will occur and you’ll be ready for another fight tomorrow._ He edged away, and John’s hand caught him like he thought Karkat was about to fall.  
  
John was smiling calmly, expression startlingly reassuring. Karkat stiffened. Why was John looking at him all soft-eyed, like he wanted Karkat to stab him in the throat? Okay—just look. All he had to do was look, and there was sure to be a tell. Somewhere in John’s expression, Karkat would see what his game was. How he was looking to trick or hurt or kill or _fucking be a troll_ instead of this weird happy smiling thing that Karkat didn’t begin to understand.  
  
“Dude. It’s okay to take a break,” John said lightly. “You look dead on your feet.” He gave Karkat a gentle shove towards the pod. “Get some rest.”  
  
Karkat stumbled towards the pod. Momentum, you understand. Stared at John’s face a little longer. Blinking, he looked away. His stomach flopped helplessly, over and over. He thought he might get why that other troll had such a nice smile when he saw John.  
  
_Don’t you do it, Vantas. Don’t do it. Abscond, fuck off to regions unknown, do not get in the fucking slime bath._  
  
Sucking in a deep, terrified breath, Karkat took another few shaky steps towards the pod and hauled himself up by his aching shoulders. Slithered into the slime and hissed in shock—it felt numb and freezing cold. If he’d been alone, his eyes would have rolled up in his head and he’d have moaned.  
  
So. Good. Tongues of cold sank into all the tears in his muscles, making them spasm, like pain was something you should shake off like dirt. Karkat’s eyes fluttered twice as his body went from an insanely horrible place to be to an insanely numb one—and then fixed a nervous glare on the two trolls watching him. John was still standing there, while the other troll shuffled off in his cloud of lusii, looking at something on a clipboard. Karkat, mind abruptly clear of fever- fog and exhaustion, stared at John and got the most bizarre urge to thank him.  
  
Meanwhile, his brain knit the pieces of John’s chatter together. Sopor slime—that’s what this stuff had to be. That other troll had put some kind of medicine into the slime. Like rubyleaf, but kicked up to ten thousand, and yeah, Karkat almost believed that he might wake up tomorrow and be ready for another ten hour strife for survival.  
  
John had just… saved his life.  
  
For, yeah, another forty-two hours. _Let’s not get sentimental, you fucktard._ And that was assuming no one drowned Karkat while he was vulnerable. Assuming that Karkat would even be functional if he just marinated in healing juice and didn’t actually sleep—this area was too exposed for that to be an option. But.  
  
He had a _chance._  
  
He cleared his throat of the sighs that wanted out. John was still standing there. “It’s Karkat,” he croaked after a moment, claws scraping nervously at the inside of the pod. His feet skidded over the bottom—he’d have felt a lot more comfortable if they could actually reach that far. Fucking metabolism. Being short sucked. Thankfully, the sopor seemed buoyant, and Karkat didn’t sink any lower than his neck in the slime.  
  
Karkat turned his eyes back out of the pod. John was looking. Ugh. “Vantas,” he added reluctantly, when John didn’t say anything. “Karkat Vantas.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, okay, I reread the draft of chapter two, and JESUS NUGGETS, did it ever suck. Tell me things like this, guys! I've edited it to no longer be worthy of your vomit, and so if you're hard up to reread stuff and actually not be cringing with horror, go for it. New readers: YOU SAW NOTHING AND I AM YOUR WRITING GOD.  
> Now, indulge me in a micro-rant. The scenes in this story run really long and I am, especially because the fight scenes are so close and I WANT, OH MY GOD, tempted to post scenes in their entirety. This would probably double my usual chapter length. So kindly lemme know if you appreciate the brevity of chapters like this, or if you're wanting to beat me up in the parking lot for not running my scenes as one chapter and getting to the action. Or whatever you wanna tell me; I'm always on the hunt for advice. Writing is not my forte; just my addiction. Help!  
> And on that note, this week was shit, next week will be hectic (if hopefully less shit) and after that I will have a reasonable update schedule. I have sorted most of my problems and now I'm just dealing with the fallout.
> 
> Also, though it has not yet proven relevant to this story, the illustrious Whittler_of_Words taught me how to code for color text. Both an epic writer and a good person who feels sorry for the technologically inept, you should all go read her fics immediately. (I'm watching you. O_O)


	4. Ripples in the Water

In the skin-crawling moment that followed opening his mouth, Karkat questioned pretty heavily whether his thinkpan needed lobotomy the way Alternia needed a universal cull.  
  
“Karkat,” John repeated. The way he said it… Karkat’s ears pricked up, straining to catch the note of _something_ he'd heard, but John didn’t repeat himself. So Karkat just looked like he was hoping for John to squawk again. Embarrassed, Karkat splashed at the slime a little bit, experimenting with the strange consistency. Ooh, look at the ripples. Never seen a fucking fluid ripple before. So much more interesting than John’s stupid face, Jegus fuck.  
  
Unfortunately, now the silence had its claws around his throat and Karkat just couldn’t shut up.  
  
“I’m just telling you because anyone else would tell you my name is Carcass.” Not that it wasn’t an apt nickname, if inadvertently so. Karkat kicked viciously at the side of his pod, and was surprised to feel how sturdy the wall was, vibrating all the way up the cocoon of slime. “Bunch of grubfucking shitpans they are, they think it’s funny. And if one more person fucking addresses me by Carcass, I swear I’ll maul them in public. I’ll do it with my fucking horns if I have to.”  
  
John laughed. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Thanks for the warning.” He tapped a hand against the side of Karkat’s pod spreading new vibrations through the liquid. Even in his slime-filled shoes, Karkat could feel that, and his toes flexed into the sensation of foreign movement. John peered at him—up, for once. Karkat tried not to gloat.  
  
“Those are some pretty nubby horns, though. Are you sure they’d work for a weapon?”  
  
Okay, scratch that. Gloat away. Gloat at the tiny ant man and his stupid glasses and bluh, this shirt was also blue. Lividly, expensively blue. Way to make an obvious target of yourself, moron! Even Karkat, isolated from everything but the occasional pirated movie, had the sense to keep his color choices prudent and tasteful. Read: black, and more black. Maybe some gray if he was feeling glamorous. More black. Although it was pretty much a uniform raggedy brown at this point, and the closest it had been to washed in days was this slime soak.  
  
Hey wait, was Karkat’s color vision was returning? Karkat blinked, secretly happy to have it back even though he didn’t strictly need it. The fever was almost over.  
  
“Fuck you, my horns are awesome.” Karkat kicked at the wall of his pod a little more gently and John blinked—oh, his hand was still there. Vibrations. Curiously, he flattened his own palm to the inside of the pod and kicked again. At almost the exact same minute, another epicenter of motion appeared as John thumped his palm against the pod. Karkat glanced over at him, a little more entertained than he probably should have been. The movement of the slime just felt… so calming.  
  
“Hey Karkat?” John whispered. His voice had dropped low enough for Karkat’s ears to twitch and optimize the sound reception. John was smiling. And he said, “Bet you make it all the way to the end. I think you’ve got it in you, for real.” He cracked his grin a little wider. “I think I’d better warn Jane this time.”  
  
Karkat’s ears flopped back down. “What, like round one didn’t knock me on my ass? You think I’m ready for another two days? No way.” He shook his head and sneered. “Don’t fucking bother. I’m probably going to die tomorrow and I’d rather not give you a show.”  
  
John grinned at him. “What? Don’t even pretend, doofus.”  
  
God, Karkat had been pretending all his life, hadn’t he? Take down the Empire. All on his own, because he was strong and fearless and a dozen other desperately inadequate qualifiers. He wouldn’t have lasted a week, no matter how he swung it.  
  
Karkat snorted—and got a lungful of slime for his troubles. John sagged against the pod giggling as Karkat hacked up the contents of his respiratory system. “Oh, fuck you,” the prospective snarled. “Stop laughing, grubtard, you sound like your gargling your thinkpan.” John just laughed louder, and whatever, apparently Karkat’s headache was dying down because the loud noise didn’t hurt anymore. Instead, Karkat was feeling that buzzing electric field again, and it made him nothing so much as itchy. “What’s your fucking deal?” Karkat demanded, stomach twisting. “Get lost.”  
  
“Why, do I need an excuse to bask in your heroic presence?”  
  
What.  
  
“Uhm, lessee—I’m worried you’re going to escape and pick floral arrangements if I don’t make you stay in the scary, scaaaary sopor?” John thumped his palm again and Karkat’s fingers flexed along the surface, locating John’s hand through the cool wall. “Or maybe I’m gonna murder you when you fall asleep! Bet you didn’t think of that, did you?”  
  
Okay. John was just a prick, wasn’t he? Karkat glowered at him. “But you have _magic,_ ” he hissed, lowering his voice. "That should be a lot more entertaining than watching my ass float!" He half expected thunderclaps and smoke from unseen crevasses and one of those posters of the Condesce’s grin saying “Silence Is Survival” for uttering the words. What he got was John floating upwards again, putting them nose to nose, and Karkat’s breath arresting midway down his windtube.  
  
“Magic’s pretty great,” John whispered to him. It reverberated in his voice. His skin, inches away, concentrated that invisible electricity. Karkat had never felt anything like it. His lips peeled back in a silent snarl, eyes widening, a tightness to his chest that told him to stay very still. John’s eyes, this close, were darker than the deepest pits of the ocean and they felt like they could drown the unwary.  
  
“…But,” the wizard murmured, “It’s like having arms. I’ve always had arms. It’s not something I put in a box and take out again… Magic’s just _there._ No big deal.”  
  
…Karkat wondered what John’s skin felt like.  
  
You know, how it would feel to be hatched impossible and so fundamentally separated from everyone else. How you got your pan around how that wasn’t spelling your own death in a set of neon letters and—You know what? That smile was just as fucking magical as the rest of it, because it didn’t belong in the real world.  
  
Karkat’s chest tightened further, fingers making fists in the slime. “Honestly, I think your head case routine is way more interesting,” John murmured. The shifting of a breeze around him cooled the sopor on his skin rapidly. Karkat didn’t shiver. He managed a breath. John toppled to the floor in a clatter of limbs, humming to himself. “—And I think I’m the authority on the matter of who I find interesting. Sorry, Karkat, but you don’t get a vote! Bzzt, try again next time.” He grinned widely into Karkat’s face. “You’re just gonna have to keep being entertainingly weird all the time.”  
  
Karkat blurted out, “Were you hatched with it?”  
  
Oh yes, good job, Vantas. Now let’s all just sit in a circle, asking personal questions that aren’t out business and holding hands. Maybe you can paint each other’s claws while you’re at it! At least John answered everything in deflections. Good. That’d spare Karkat the fucking indignity of getting answers to his overpoweringly stupid questions. “Yeah, I was,” John said. See? Totally vague and—  
  
“What?” Karkat propped his head up on the lip of the pod so he could glower down at this other troll. His mouth twisted. Another question was pushing off of his tongue as he stared. “I guess it was…” Karkat lowered his ears, trying to think of the least offensive way possible to phrase this. Let’s see… “Advantageous?”  
  
John grimaced at him. “Whoa, okay. Here I am, opening my heart to you, and you’re just going to be a jerk about it?”  
  
“What?” Karkat recoiled. “No, I didn’t—fucking forget it, then!” He’d just assumed—John’s coloring was weird; he was so pale. He didn’t seem to own rage capillaries outside of low-level insults and he, just, oh god, what had Karkat even _asked?!_  
  
“Calling me a,” John shuddered so strongly that Karkat felt it drumming through the slime. “ _Mutant._ ” Karkat’s heart jackhammered at the familiar word. At the contempt icing John’s tone like the frosting on the fecal matter sundae of Karkat’s life. He shared that contempt. Shared every drop. He should kill John right now.  
  
“I didn’t say that!” Karkat hissed, jaw clenching, and when John squeaked, he was jumpy enough to be halfway out of the sopor before he realized the magician was suffocating with laughter.  
  
In explanation, John offered, “your face.” Karkat, panting, spine completely iced over, thought about all the ways he could hurt John from here. There were 16. They were each appealing. 4 would be lethal, 2 had maiming potential.  
  
“Nah,” John said when he’d recovered enough to be less of an asshole (at which point Karkat was no longer contemplating ill-advised death blows from the awkward fucking position of a slime pod. “This isn’t a mutation! Lots of trolls have magic. Even Our Imperial Condescension has it—or at least I think so?” He tapped a finger to his chin, pondering. “Well whatever. I heard from someone that she did.”  
  
Karkat had never heard anyone use the Condesce’s name and ‘well whatever’ close together. He was fairly certain it was blasphemous. His ears flicked.  
  
“But hey, get this,” John said with a conspiratorial smile that did nothing to make Karkat hate him less, even though he did lean forward to catch John’s next words. “My whole broodnest got cleansed in the caverns. Only me and this other dude survived.”  
  
Karkat blinked. “Yeah?”  
  
John was saying something else about him having had enough pigment to escape the cull. Lucky; he and his friend had been gifted with enough of the right genetics to be allowed their lives. Lucky so lucky, lucky.  
  
Karkat squeezed his eyes closed. He let his head list forward like he was sleepy, or bored, or just. Anything that wouldn’t make it look like he cared. “Good for you.”  
  
“Right? I’ve turned out pretty good for almost being an auto-cull,” John said cheerfully. “The other guy—Dave—he’s turned out okay too. I mean, nowhere near as awesome as me, but I’ll give him credit where it’s due. He’s not as much of a freak as he seems!” John’s voice had warmed up at this other troll’s name. Karkat wondered if that was a thing John always did—hugging the Jane prospective and talking about his broodmate like they’d never kill each other.  
  
Karkat’s mouth asked, because it was a treacherous piece of shit, “Kind of a shame about the rest of your broodnest, then.” His throat was sealing shut. He coughed. “I mean, do you think they’d have turned out alright too?”  
  
John poked him in the cheek, startling Karkat’s eyes open. “You dork,” John informed him, smiling as Karkat growled. “They were mutants; they had to be killed. If you’re trying to entrap me into treason, it’s not working.”  
  
Yeah, Karkat. Stop trying to entrap people into treason or whatever the fuck.  
  
Karkat sneered. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” He batted John’s hand away and the other troll flopped against the pod with a sigh. “Go away,” Karkat snapped at him. He didn’t like John being this close.  
  
“Nope,” John responded.  
  
“NOW,” Karkat snapped.  
  
John giggled. “Nnnnope! Wow, now you’re too good for a deviantbroodling?” He waggled his eyebrows as he said it, unconcerned that Karkat was baring his teeth. “Cool, dude,” John laughed at him. “You can be as cranky as you like. I’m just here to be amused.”  
  
“Go eat a bulge,” Karkat snapped.  
  
“Go fuck a shellsquid,” John retorted immediately. Karkat paused because of the profanity—also, because what the crap was a shellsquid even supposed to be?  
  
Lame. “Drink yourself to death with a vat of acid and scream in silent agony.”  
  
“You—Karkat Vantas— _suck._ ”  
  
Karkat snorted. John looked up and grinned widely. _Ha,_ said that grin. _I have once more circumvented your fury network. You are the inferior between us._ Karkat mentally flipped that grin off. “There’s something deeply wrong with you,” Karkat offered.  
  
It was meant to hit where it hurt. His tone said, _mutant_. Just the way John had said it, all full of perfectly justifiable hate.  
  
All John did was wink at him and declare, “I also happen to be exceptionally hard to get rid of. Sucks for you.”  
  
Karkat blinked at him. There was a bloom of warmth in his stomach that he wasn’t expecting. Karkat looked away, grumbling, tingling, floating in the slime. What was this?—exhilarating as anger and painless. For a minute, he was almost looking forward to tomorrow’s trial.  
  
Then he regrew a thinkpan and kicked himself.  
  
“Get the hell out of here so I can sleep,” he growled at John. “I’m going to show everyone up at the trial tomorrow, and I need to be fucking perky as hell.”  
  
John froze in midair, just in front of Karkat’s face—close enough to bite—and smiled until his cheeks were swollen apples of stupidhappy and Karkat actually wanted to poke them. What. How was that a thing? “Okay,” he said, and Karkat wasn’t expecting it—John darted even closer, knocking his cartilage nub briefly against Karkat’s. It made a noise like a clock and John’s weird electric field raced down Karkat’s spine in shiver after shiver. John reeled back, giggling. “Yep! Be careful not to suck!”  
  
And then he was swooshing off, whistling some tune that Karkat didn’t know. Karkat watched the blue troll go (from behind he was all horns and needle claws and fucking terrifying as hell), reflexively peeling his shoes off in the slime—ahhhmygog, it felt amazing to scrunch his toes in the goo. Karkat glanced around the room to make sure no other trolls were within attacking range. Okay. Then he did it a few more times, sighing in bliss.  
  
He had no intention of going to sleep in an unfamiliar area where trolls could just waltz the fuck in as they please. Nope, screw that sideways with a shellsquid. It wasn’t a problem, though. Karkat was great at functioning on no sleep for days at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guysguysguysguys the fight is next! The first fight! Probably the lamest fight too BUT I DON'T CARE! HITTING! YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRAVE THE HITTING lakghdfkgjaehfagol
> 
> I don't have violent tendencies. That is a dirty, dirty lie.
> 
> Okay! So, this chapter should answer the question a bit about how tolerant the current Alternia is. It also explains a liiiittle bit more about who this strange troll who's following Karkat around is! I'm not saying that Karkat's preconceptions about troll society are generally even in the ballpark of correct, but he got this one right. It is bad to be different on Alternia.
> 
> I've also been asked whether our disgruntled hero is in fact a mutant in this AU... And I would like to make that clear here: this is being left ambiguous for the time being. I know the answer, and now you guys know that Karkat _does_ have some very strong feelings about mutation, but there is a reason why it hasn't come up yet. You will see, if you care to keep reading.
> 
> (Also, I discovered Mambostuck last night. I don't think my heart is beating normally anymore.)


	5. One Shot Is All You Get

His skin was humming, he felt so _good_ …  
  
Wait.  
  
Wait, why didn’t anything hurt?  
  
Karkat snapped his eyes open and blinked into the light. Slime pod, not the barracks, lusii everywhere...? Karkat's sluggish brain refused to do any explaining on the subject. He ran a quick check--not dead (good), limbs attached (also good), memories sort of... drifting back into place. This was the infirmary, wasn't it?  
  
Wait, if he'd fallen asleep--just setting aside how colossally dangerous that had been--what time was it? Karkat scanned the walls until he saw a clock and berated himself until he was able to make sense of the symbols on it. About… five, six minutes to spare _before the next trial began._  
  
No.  
“ShitFUCK!” Karkat yelped, adrenaline rocketing through his blood. He clawed his way out of the pod, cracking loudly against the floor in a sticky, oozing mess. Some other evidently living troll woke up in his own pod and started screaming about this. Karkat did not fucking care. He swore steadily, pumping his legs to their limit and tearing through a cloud of lusii. He charging at the door and broke through to lurch down the hall, bare feet slapping slimy footprints all over the floor.  
  
Five fucking minutes! The penalty for fleeing a trial was culling! HOW HAD HE MANAGED TO SLEEP FOR THAT LONG?!  
  
Karkat made it to his cell with maybe a two second margin, out of breath, feeling crusty and wet and weird, shivering because he was soaked, and groping for his damn sickles, which were thankfully still in his belt. His muscles felt tight as he swung the weapons to his sides, which concerned him. Not stiff like he was sore, and not tight the same way they got after he’d really busted them but they’d numbed to the pain. Just tight. Weirdly stretchy. Karkat got the most bizarre feeling that he could have tied his limbs in a knot and they’d just bend like water.  
  
What the _fuck_ had been in that sopor stuff?  
  
But there was no time to think about that before the cell gate was locked behind him and Karkat’s drone switched on. He blinked at it and its carapace—yesterday he’d been fighting a white drone, which to his knowledge, everyone was pitted against. Whitewings, colloquially known as softshells. Today, his fucking enemy was the color of his soaking wet black shirt (which threatened to ooze down his hips at the slightest provocation, or just disintegrate into the original scraps he’d stitched together).  
  
That. Was not. A softshell.  
  
_That_ was what was colloquially known as You Have Fucked Up Big Time, Vantas.  
  
Karkat glanced up at the high platform where the officiators sat. Commander Zahhak just so happened to be looking down at him. He had a glass of something in hand—Karkat was abruptly reminded that he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in a long time (not that he’d expected to get anything; it was more that he zeroed in on Zahhak’s fucking juice and had the strangest urge to go challenge his commander to a fight to the death)—and he took a sip as Karkat stared at him. He raised the glass to the slime-soaked prospective.  
  
_Remember those orders about standing down and not breaking Imperial property?_  
  
…Karkat was beginning to get the impression that he shouldn’t have torn a chunk out of his softshell.  
  
Which was when the drone slammed a claw down—spinning like a drill—and stripped out a chunk of the floor. Karkat rolled to the side to avoid the follow-up. Before he could think any further, the robot was on him, moving like it never planned to give him a moment to breathe. Strike, strike, strike. Each attack was different, and the force behind them wouldn’t let Karkat try to deflect a single one. He’d break his arms—worse, he’d break his sickles. Fucking sentimentality. Shit. With an onslaught like this, there was no way to get a fight trance going. No battle fever, no nothing, just an enemy slicing at Karkat like the beat of a drum. He spun away again and again, throat closing.  
  
He could just try to dodge for the next ten hours. He’d live. At least, until they opened the gates and culled him for poor performance. Threshecutioners didn’t avoid and evade. They took the enemy apart between their claws and fed them their own entrails. Metaphorically. Did drones even have mouths?  
  
Fuck. Was this bastard getting even _faster?_  
  
Yes, Karkat noted, nearly getting chopped in two when he ducked half a second too slow. The drone was speeding up. Frantic, he threw himself between the robot’s legs and slid out, slamming a bare foot against the wall to stop himself and rolling away from under another series of drills. They followed him, refusing to let him up, hammering—he was going to back into the wall, shit—  
  
No battle fever. He had absolutely none on its way, either; fear was smothering it. His strength would be halved, if his sickles could even penetrate this carapace, _come on Vantas, are you planning on dying like this because Zahhak fucked you over?_  
  
Zahhak.  
  
Oh. Yes. Karkat had forgotten about Zahhak.  
  
_Finally_ , the right chemicals poured into Karkat’s bloodstream. Aggression overwhelmed the wail of wriggler fear. It was like being six sweeps old again, getting his first weapons from Crabdad, the ancient lusus bending down around him to whisper in its strange, clicking language. Karkat hadn’t understood the words. Too fascinated by the shiny new weapons and the mesmerizing way light caught on his lusus’s exosekeleton. Crabdad’s claw had closed around his head, sharp, bony ridges digging in. Karkat hadn’t minded at first—Crabdad had weird ideas of affection. And then it had hurt. Hurt so badly, blood spilled into his eyes, blinding him and he couldn’t move. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t move.  
  
Couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t oh god please don’t—  
  
And then Crabdad, in the middle of that incredible ring of pain slicing through Karkat’s thinkpan, had breathed a single word, perfectly audible, perfectly understandable, questioning the skeletons in Karkat’s soul.  
  
_See?_  
  
When Karkat had opened his eyes again, he’d careened into consciousness in a heap on the kitchen floor, dried blood crusted all over his face and his lusus nowhere to be found. To Karkat’s swollen eyes, the way light touched things was no longer interesting. The new weapons in his hands were gripped with no more wonder than the spoon he’d eat with. They had purpose. _So much_ purpose. Just like Karkat.  
  
_See?_  
  
Here’s your talent. Here’s what they taught you. Here’s what they should kill you for, your unstoppable gift. If only they knew. If only they knew what they handed you, six sweeps ago, when they made you the enemy of your entire fucking race.  
  
You are rage.  
  
You are Karkat Vantas. You are _rage._  
  
Now. Fulfill your purpose.  
  
In the prospective cell—split between the millisecond where he died and the one where he lived—Karkat’s muscles bunched, hands beneath his head, and he _pushed_. Sank into the air. Blinked, eyes wide at the sight of a black carapace swiveling to face him from meters below. Karkat’s head turned, amazed, staring down into the beehive network of cells around him, the white carapaces within, then up, thinking he saw Zahhak’s eyes widen behind those fucking stupid shades of his.  
  
Zahhak. Trying to get him killed. The commander wasn’t any different from the rest of them, really. They were all trying to kill Karkat, even if they didn’t know it yet. But Zahhak knew exactly what he’d done, locking Karkat in a cell with a black carapace. And more importantly, Karkat thought he was a fucking asshole.  
  
God, it was good to be angry again.  
  
Grinning, Karkat swung his arms out, almost like he thought he could slow his descent. This would take some getting used to—these sopor-soaked muscles packed almost twice the punch he’d thought he had—but there was no time like the present. The swing of his arms made him revolve in midair, as he dropped back towards the opposite wall, over his enemy, and when he was in range, he kicked his feet out. Hit the wall. Hissed at the shivers that climbed through his bones in response. The carapace’s head revolved and locked on to his new position. Its body began to turn, relatively slow in comparison to its attacks.  
  
Karkat’s muscles tensed, locked, and shot him forward like a slingshot. Swung his blade out when he thought he’d found the optimal distance—  
  
Got smashed the fuck out of the air by one of those spinning claws. Holy shit, ow.  
  
Karkat gathered himself to his feet, too slow, saw the claw drilling down at the top of his head. Tried to fling himself out of the way and lost his footing instead. Here came claw number two. Way too fucking fast to slip; the bitch had kicked it up to eleven when Karkat had surprised it. Zahhak hadn’t just given Karkat a drone with new armor, it had a whole new battle algorithm. Fuck.  
  
If Karkat couldn’t move fast enough, maybe he could apply a little tactical strategy. The theatrics from the softshell trial had been dumber than shit. Screw Past Him. But these new muscles… time to see just how flexible they really were.  
  
Instead of trying to dodge the claw and getting split in half for his troubles, Karkat swung a leg up and over the carapace rushing at him. He snapping his arms up in the same shock motion—not to try to deflect the attack, but to latch onto it. For a moment, he felt like he’d be slung straight off, but his fingers found a groove in the carapace and he had enough time to admire his own ingenuity—he’d effectively hitched a ride on the drone’s own weapon while making sure it couldn’t attack him.  
  
The other claw whipped out at him—oh right, there was that.  
  
Karkat slithered up, trying to ignore the disconcerting feeling that his limbs weren’t really his—he was twisting at bizarre angles to duck narrow snaps of claws, and it was _effortless_ —and when a claw stabbed straight at his midsection too quickly to deal with, Karkat simply flipped himself onto the new limb, and clung.  
  
The damn drone actually punched a hole in its own arm. Karkat dangled, unharmed, momentarily amused in the haze of anger. He’d spent so long fearing these things, and what were they? Just machines. Stupid tin cans that he could trick with minimal effort.  
  
They could still stick him full of holes. Karkat hitched a ride on the injured arm again, before gloating got him eviscerated, and hooked his sickles in the hole his enemy had drilled through itself. While evading another slash at his throat, he threw himself down, trying to work his weight enough to get the drone off-balance—it didn’t work, but it did tug its arm low enough to reach. While he had it, Karkat slammed his sickles against the damaged carapace recklessly, sending up a plume of stinging sparks.  
  
Hopefully sopor wasn’t flammable, and he really should have thought about that earlier.  
  
The robot was on him again immediately when he got off the ride, firing off those damned combos, too fast to do much else but dodge and wait for any opening long enough to test his sickles on the carapace again. There were no openings, though. None that Karkat recognized. Not until Karkat was twining himself through the enemy’s arms, hacking while he took a ride. He still didn’t have the time to do any incapacitating damage. The drone moved to fast; everything on the troll’s part was just a back to back series of impulses and reactions.  
  
However, eventually Karkat’s blade caught a seam in the metal enough times. The drone’s armor gasped open with a crackling sound, and Karkat got flung off—up in the air, it seemed like the simplest fucking thing in the world to aim himself, sink into the fall, and hammer both his sickles down into the cracked seam.  
  
The arm split open like a fish skin. The claw-drill that had slashed at Karkat so many times sent out a blinding burst of white electricity.  
  
Karkat screeched—hit the ground, breathless and stunned, silently screaming at his legs to move and get him back. Fortunately, the drone seemed to be experiencing an ill effect or two itself. Karkat managed to limp a respectable distance away and close his shaking fingers a few times, warding away the numbness. In the center of the cell, the drone was still. Had he busted it? Electricity kept arcing out of the damaged limb until there was a plume of fire branching from it, the claw dangling by a few wires, the whole limb still sparking in a way that made Karkat want out of this cell.  
  
When the flaming, electrified limb swung at him with the same speed it had possessed previously, he concluded that yeah, he sucked at thinking things through. Karkat ducked frantically, abandoning his sickles—the handles were too hot to hold right now—and just focused on keeping the drone away from him.  
  
In one fell swoop he’d fucked both his avoidance strategy and managed not to do anything but make the robot more dangerous.  
  
_Nice going, genius. Next time, just go for the head and hack until it comes off. Then let it run around like a blind chicken. Flaming heads aren’t scary unless they’re being thrown at you._  
  
Woulda, shoulda, coulda.  
  
At least he’d done some damage? Could Karkat—seriously, fuck, how much faster was this thing going to _get?_ —just avoid being killed until the gong rang? The fight felt like it was moving fast, but battle fever did that to you. Karkat might have already been in here for hours (or it could have been just a few minutes). As he ducked another series of blows, he considered it. There had to be an upper limit on how fast this drone could move. But if Karkat judged it wrong and was too tired to fight when dodging stopped being an option…  
  
Fuck it. He wanted to take the bastard down anyway.  
  
As soon as he thought that, a shower of sparks exploded from the vicinity of the drone’s head. Karkat hesitated, almost convinced that perhaps he was getting a run of good luck.  
  
Incorrect.  
  
This deduction brought to you by the FUCKING LASER THAT THE DRONE SHOT AT HIM. KARKAT WAS PRETTY DAMN SURE THIS WASN’T PART OF THE TEST PROTOCOL.  
  
BECAUSE IT HAD JUST PUT A HOLE IN HIS WALL.  
  
(And possibly a hole in the prospective in the cell next to his, but Karkat was all out of fucks to give.)  
  
SHIT.  
  
“Fuck you, Zahhak,” Karkat seethed under his breath, circling back towards his abandoned sickles. “How the hell is this fair? You fuck me over when I make a mess and I get to clean up yours. Die in a fire.” He managed to sweep the sickles up, wincing as he closed his fingers around the overheated handles. Nothing he could do about it, but—incoming laser!  
  
_Shit!_  
  
Karkat hissed wordlessly, weaving backwards, away from the enemy, as his fingers burned. “For once in your life, don’t fuck this up, come on.” He just needed one opening. He was pretty sure that was all he’d be getting. Another series of lasers whipped at him and he threw himself to the side. The lasers seemed to come in bursts. Karkat hoped to fuck there was a recharge period, and as soon as the barrage stopped, he took his shot.  
  
Rushed in, breathing hard. Clip of pain in his side—the burning limb had swung wider than he thought, or maybe that was just the drill dangling off of it. No time to concern himself; he’d just have to hope it was a blunt wound and that he wasn’t actually bleeding.  
  
Karkat looped his arms around the drone’s unbroken arm and scrambled up it, whipping his hands out of the way of the flaming limb, which was beating at the undamaged arm with a complete lack of coordination—or concern. This thing was one big glitch. But Karkat sure didn’t have time to wait for it to blow itself up.  
  
A burst of sharp, bloody pain whited out his sight for a moment—leg, _oh fuck_ , direct hit. His leg was done, bone and all. The limb went dread with pain and Karkat nearly dropped. He gripped his sickles between his teeth as he clawed his way up the last few feet. The flaming arm whipped towards him as he climbed up, and the head spun 360 degrees, a blinding light blooming in its center. Laser. Right at him. And Karkat had nowhere to go.  
  
One fucking shot; welcome to crunch time. He ground his teeth together so hard it made his head go fuzzy. Reared back. Swung his blades with all his might at the neck seated between his legs.  
  
_Come on—!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't care if you all tell me I can't write fight scenes for shit. I HAD SO MUCH FUN WRITING THIS. Fights are the best thing. In the world.
> 
> You guys are just lucky I don't hold any real power.
> 
> Anyway, this is my favorite fic of all the ones I'm writing. Fluff is great, humor is great--but senseless violence is my jam. XD


	6. Write Yourself Off

By the time the trial officiators actually summoned the security drones, Karkat was on the ground, curled unmoving around his crippled leg. His sickles were somewhere across the cell. He couldn’t have moved to get them (even if his burned fingers had the strength to close). The adrenaline, the battle fever, the rage. All of it was gone, burned to a crisp. The only stroke of luck was that he wasn’t bleeding while he lay there, struggling to breathe. If he died, he’d die a troll.  
  
The black carapace drone that Karkat had hacked to hell and back after decapitating it—after destroying it utterly—that hadn’t been anything you’d call ‘luck’. That had been pure, unadulterated fury, and fuck anyone who said otherwise.  
  
Trial security was escorting a repair bot with them which busied itself with the fallen drone. Karkat’s enemy had its head somewhere on the other side of the cell—the swing of Karkat’s rage-powered, sopor-healed muscles had flung it into the wall. Left a dent too. Its loss had slowed the drone down. Karkat had been able to arch backwards, clinging with his thighs, and evade the flaming arm’s sweep at his head. The drone’s attack had flailed senselessly at the air.  
  
Dizzy with pain and numb with rage and _alive_ , Karkat had lacerated the main body of its carapace again and again, heedless of electrical shorts and razor edges. He did not want it fucking moving. He’d slung himself along its back and shoulders to avoid its arms, and kept going until he was so coated in sweat and oil and coolant he was one big puddle. His good leg had felt about as steady as sopor slime; he couldn’t really feel the damaged one anymore.  
  
And he’d won.  
  
They were both on the ground now, Karkat and his kill. The drone was gouged all over, and the wiring within was probably unsalvageable. Each time Karkat had broken through, he’d dug the sickles in and _twisted_ , snarling in fury.  
  
Karkat Vantas, auto-cull piece of shit, had clawed his way through the second trial and _he’d won._  
  
The repair drone only examined the Karkat’s opponent for a moment before it moved away, disinterested in the pile of scrap Karkat had left behind.  
  
Karkat, eyes slitted open to watch, managed a faint smile. He shifted to curl more fully around his injured limb when the security drones approached. Karkat had already checked for blood as best he could without inadvertently showing the cameras if he really was bleeding—and he didn’t think he was. It was mostly just unintelligible bruising and scratches thin enough for him to feign rustblood status. Except for his leg. He had no doubt that was a bloody mess beneath his pants, but the heat had cauterized the damage (probably, hopefully) and as long as no one looked closely, he was okay. Maybe the sopor could fix it.  
  
Yeah. Fucking right.  
  
The black drone had been completely worth it. The trophy of a lifetime.  
  
Karkat just wished his moment could last a little longer. Long enough to be proud of himself. Having a kill did not feel that great right now. Karkat only felt tired and hurt, and kind of empty without anything to rage at. He was really fucking thirsty. He hoped, suddenly, that his sickles weren’t cracked. He’d forgotten about them, when he’d thought he was going to die. He was barefoot and there were scratches all over his feet. Maybe some of them were too deep. He tried to roll himself over, away from security, ignoring the clawing pain in his limb.  
  
The security drones stopped marching for a moment, clearly receiving orders. Instead of showing further interest in the potentially bleeding troll (to Karkat’s relief), they grabbed up the black drone’s components and began to methodically drag them from the room. They did not take Karkat’s sickles—and even better, Zahhak opted not to shove a new drone in. Karkat wouldn’t have put it past him. Zahhak was an unmitigated asscake. But no, it seemed like Karkat was just being left to huddle on the cell floor until the trial was over. He had no idea when it would end. How long had his fight lasted? It felt like it had maybe been days.  
  
Ugh, well. That pissed him off a little bit. Maybe enough to give him the energy to move. Now that trial security was gone, it was as safe as it would ever be.  
  
Hissing with discomfort, Karkat uncurled from his swollen, throbbing leg. Planted his palms in the dirt. His fingers weren’t too happy about being stretched out and made to haul his body weight, but they would just have to deal with it. Yeah, they were burned enough to sting, but he could put a little weight on them without screaming and folding to the floor.  
  
Karkat had already learned that this was not true of his leg when he’d tried to step away from his fallen opponent. On the positive side, he hadn’t thrown up yet. So that was more liquid conserved and less dignity lost.  
  
Once he was in range, Karkat yanked his sickles close. Inspected them with his fingers—he’d blunted them to hell, but Crabdad had come through. They were good weapons. Better than the shitty, expensive metal used to make the carapaces of drones. Somehow. The blades were smooth and solid—cool against Karkat’s burned fingers. He shuddered with relief, and curled around his leg again. Blades close at hand if he needed them, waiting for his kill to feel good, conserving what little energy he had left. Great plan.  
  
Karkat closed his eyes and breathed—he wasn’t going to sleep, with pain gnawing at him like this—and waited for the gong to sound.  
  
He’d won this fight, but he knew very clearly that surviving the next one wasn’t even an option. He was done.  
  
It was… it was over.

\----

As the gong sounded, Zahhak invited his prospectives to roar. From his huddle on the floor, Karkat managed a snarl of his own. He closed his burned fingers around the hilts of his sickles and enjoyed the pain. Still alive. It felt a little more like victory now.  
  
He’d need to wait for the other prospectives to go first. They’d be tired, but more than capable of killing him like this. Karkat could haul himself out of his cell afterwards—he could crawl if he had to. Find some sopor slime. He was positive it would make his leg hurt less. Maybe he’d find some water along the way.  
  
Maybe he’d never get up. He wasn’t sure he could, and he was scared to try and find out. _You’re a fucking wuss, Vantas._

\----

Karkat’s ears swiveled, listening for any disturbance. But no, he was alone; those footsteps seemed to be the last, which meant he was officially out of excuses. Karkat forced himself up before he could think about it. Nearly sank his teeth into his lip before he realized that screaming was a much better alternative. Managed two stumbling steps, folded, and panted helplessly into the dust, fingers trembling around the sickles.  
  
Crawling it was, then. The thought made Karkat sicker than it should have. He waited for his head to clear and then pulled his good leg under him.  
  
He—he just needed to keep the weight off of his injury. He could do that. He was pretty sure the other leg was broken and determinedly not thinking about splints. No Crabdad to fix him up this time. Fuck, fuck, fuck.  
  
Went down again. Thought he was kind of getting used to it. The pain only made his head swim a little bit. Karkat laughed hoarsely, throat full of dust, and picked himself up faster this time.  
  
And of course by the time he’d sweated and dug his claws into the gravel enough to have the cell block exit in sight, there was a troll standing there, looking right at him.  
  
Karkat’s body went cold with panic at the sight of him. An enemy, _shit._ Maybe Karkat could hack out his ankles and out-crawl him. Fuck. Why’d this troll have to be looking right at him? Clearly waiting for him, to pick off the weakling—and after a moment of frozen, adrenaline-fueled analysis, during which Karkat was genuinely considering hurling one of his precious sickles at the bastard’s face, he managed to see past the unfamiliar uniform and recognize the surprisingly solemn gaze being directed at him.  
  
Karkat choked a little, and didn’t quite manage to stop his shoulders from slumping with relief. Stupid. How do you know he isn’t planning your death right this minute? Stop acting like someone’s pet woofbeast and show a little common sense.  
  
Common sense was a load of bullshit anyway. Karkat sighed the contents of his lungs like he didn’t want to touch oxygen ever again. “Hi. John.”  
  
John—for once not wearing blue; someone had apparently told him that, oh, eye-gouging purple was a better idea; he looked like a singularly mutated grape—didn’t stop lounging against the wall. He shook his head slowly. “I knew you’d make it out of your cell, Karkat.” There was a strange, steely note in his voice as he said, “You were spectacular today.”  
  
Not smiling either, which looked unnatural on John. For a moment, the words were hard to process. When they went through, all Karkat could think was that he’d made a real kill—yeah, god, yes. There you go. This time, even with the pain, he was proud. “Yeah, well.” Karkat’s mouth pulled back into one of his horrifying attempts at smiling. All teeth and no warmth. “I’ll be dead tomorrow.” He swept an arm at his throbbing leg, snickering. “ _That_ was pretty spectacular, though. I’m a fucking moron.” If he’d avoided that hit, he would have lived (well, until the end of the trials, but those hours were precious).  
  
(Shut up, sue him if he wanted to look at the sky or some shit. That was Karkat’s damn business.)  
  
John replied point blank, “I’ve seen adults with years of training take down a black carapace as a team, Karkat. I don’t think that what you did has ever been done.” He cracked a smile—but it looked... wrong? Strange for John. Kind of shy, or like he didn’t mean it all the way. Karkat didn’t know how to read it, so he lowered his head and frowned.  
  
“They might have to change the pail collection protocols, you know. I heard them talking about it. Because some nobody threshecutioner prospective took down a black drone.”  
  
Karkat shrugged. He wasn’t going to say it was luck when it wasn’t. It was training. It was anger. It was Crabdad’s sickles. It was boneheaded determination that he was going to have one kill to his name by tomorrow.  
  
Anyway, the affairs of highbloods didn’t concern him, so long as no one used that stupid highblood growl on him. Karkat hated the sound.  
  
With that thought, one of the sickles clattered from his fingers—numb and gone slack from relief (John was h— _DO NOT FINISH THAT THOUGHT_ ). It had the nerve to skitter a good two feet away too. Karkat swore, not entirely convinced that he could grab the escapee without screaming his head off in front of John. Uninterested in killing him or not, there was no way Karkat was displaying that kind of weakness in front of a troll. _Any_ troll. So he just kind of leaned against his own patch of wall, glowering and avoiding John’s smile.  
  
Footsteps crunched in the gravel. John—walking. Nearer. _T-minus decision time, Karkat; he’s going to get in ankle-hacking range_. Karkat jerked his eyes towards the other troll, who snapped his fingers out and had Karkat’s weapon sailing into his grip.  
  
_Show off._ Karkat scowled.  
  
John stopped just before he crossed into Karkat’s space, and examined the weapon in his hand. Karkat could read the amusement in his eyes-- _the same sickle that nearly hit me in the head?_ —and then the wizard held the weapon up to the light, swiping a thumb almost reverently across the surface.  
  
Fuck. The look on John’s face made something in Karkat’s bloodpusher swell up and make him stupid. They were damn good blades. Someone other than Karkat finally knew that. Without even realizing it, Karkat’s ears had flopped back down.  
  
When John crossed into his space, Karkat didn’t lash out at him. The sickle was presented to him like dealing with trolls really was this easy. “These have been loved,” John said simply.  
  
Karkat reached out cautiously. Like before, John made Karkat do the work, instead of floating the blade over.  
  
Unlike before, when Karkat got his fingers around the handle, John didn’t let go.  
  
Skin to skin, and it made Karkat prickle all over. Fucking weird electricity magic. Karkat’s eyes darted to the bigger troll. John no longer looked like a mutant grape, and Karkat’s throat was going drier than usual.  
  
“Who made them?” John asked.  
  
“My lusus,” Karkat murmured, and then snorted. Looking at John made the electricity worse. His sickles were more interesting anyway. “Shit… They’re blunted straight to fuck.” When Karkat tugged, John’s fingers slid away. Karkat busied himself stuffing the weapons into his belt, ears tracking the sound of John’s breathing.  
  
“Give them to me,” John suggested. “I know a good repaireviscerator. She’ll fix them up for you in time for tomorrow’s trial, and you can use them with pride.”  
  
“Like I’m going to the trial,” Karkat snorted, and glanced up again. “Fuck that all kinds of times. I’m going straight to the execution block to withdraw from the test.” Why was John was staring at him? Karkat grimaced back. “What? This leg is trashed. Look at me. I can’t even stand right now.”  
  
John blinked once. “So you’re going to give up?” Karkat couldn’t read the look on his face. Shock, and something else. Something that made Karkat _nervous_. Suddenly, he remembered not to like John standing so close. “Just like that? You kill off one of the black drones, and then you… volunteer to die?” John’s forehead creased as he leaned in closer. For once, Karkat didn’t pay attention to his teeth or horns or claws.  
  
“Jeez,” John breathed, shaking his head. Karkat stopped breathing. John looked. Sad. “You really mean that. You’re going to let them kill you.”  
  
_Don’t,_ Karkat nearly blurted. _Just smile like an idiot. It kind of works on you._ Karkat dropped his eyes, and his sneer fell with it.  
  
For a second, he thought about the whole wretched story, and how he hadn’t really had an option except for death since the beginning. So what if he survived the last trial? Hell, what if he survived the whole thing and no one ever found out what he was? No, let’s get downright preposterous—let’s say he hadn’t come to try out for the threshecutioners at all. What then? What about when he hit the twelfth perigee of the right sweep? He could never fill a bucket. Culled.  
  
What about when he finally screwed up and got a visible cut in front of someone else? Two drops of blood—culled.  
  
What about when he didn’t die as some nameless prospective—Carcass Vantas—in the middle of his threshecutioner exam, and everyone who’d ever fucked up enough to talk to him got hunted down and ended too? Karkat had seen what would happen. He’d seen a lot of things, with his lusus whispering directly into his mind. His lusus, the one organism on Alternia who loved him enough to let him live. His lusus, who had sent him off to die. Karkat’s throat closed.  
  
He couldn’t have explained it to John even if he wanted to. He had his leg under him and could stay upright with the wall at his back. Good enough.  
  
Except John was making a face like it mattered to him and wasn’t killing him at all, and all this clinging electricity was making Karkat shiver. It was fucking making this shit start aching again and Karkat couldn't deal with that right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BOOMIN LIKE A BASS DRUM SPARKIN UP A RHYTHM BB COME ON  
> APRIL FOOLS!  
> THIS JOKE IS HILARIOUS  
> EVERYBODY SHHH, NO, IT'S HILARIOUS  
> :D  
> (Trollin' like a baller.)


	7. Seadwellers and Their Sopor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My lovely charming wonderful neighbors were having a dance party throughout the time I was trying to edit this.  
> I'm very sorry. Just generally. Also (cause I can't figure out how to do the imagy-imagy thing on here), I did concept art for the Karkat and John in this AU, and you can find it here: http://hazardgear.tumblr.com/image/81728862292
> 
> Yay!  
> In other news, I figured out how to do Rich Text, which means I'll no longer have to spend hours adding back in all the page breaks and italics and stuff.  
> Yay!  
> (Now there is vacuuming and these walls are apparently made of tissue paper. Kill me)

How much did Karkat’s life care about what he could or could not handle after just getting the shit kicked out of him in his cell? Let’s go with a resounding: Ha. Ha ha. Haaaah.

Ha.

The other troll was still giving him this look like Karkat had betrayed him by… what exactly? How the fuck was John confusing himself into thinking he had a stake in Karkat’s survival?

Karkat shook his head. The word ‘pointless’ came strongly to mind. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, dumbass. Dying would be good for me.” He coughed, throat feeling like it was about to glue itself together and choke him at any moment. He’d sweated way too much. He glared up at John, who was still making like Karkat was a bug on his microscope.

But this conversation was over, buh-bye.

“There a river nearby or anything?” Karkat demanded—and because this was part of the royal complex and seadwellers were insane, he had to specify, “Freshwater.”

“Not for miles,” John’s eyebrows pressed together. As Karkat coughed again, wanting to kick something and not having a leg to do it, John asked, “When was the last time you had a drink?”

Still better than discussing climbing the steps to the executioner’s block, standing against the wall, and fucking counting to ten.

Karkat tried to remember. “Three—four days ago.” His ears slunk low at the thought of the water he’d sipped. Yuck. He almost certainly had parasites now, not that it mattered. John arched an eyebrow.

“Why didn’t you ask for water in the infirmary?” His voice dipped sharp. Too sharp, too fast. Coming down from his fight like he was, Karkat bristled up.

Oh great, and there went his color vision. Could his life please take a break from relentlessly screwing him, maybe five seconds? Just a thought. “…Was I supposed to?” Shitty though they were (the majority of his shirt was stitched-together dish rags), Karkat needed his clothes. He had nothing else to barter with.

“It’s kind of common sense,” John informed Karkat with a pleasant smile on his face and distinctly sour tone in his voice, “To ask for water if you’re thirsty. Particularly if you’re _severely dehydrated_. Or is that all part of your adorable little death wish too?”

Yeah, okay, Karkat wasn’t overreacting. If John wanted to pick a fight, he could do that shit elsewhere. “Fuck off.” Case dismissed, conversation OVER. Karkat shoved forward (leaning heavily on the wall because he had to). A hand crashed down in front of him, barring his way. Karkat kept his eyes on the muscles standing rigid in John’s sleeve, fingers flexing for his sickles.

His voice came out lower than he meant it to. “ _Get out of my way_.”

“But I think we were still talking,” John answered. The bones in the back of his hand were jutting out, knuckles white, and oh look, his claws were buried at least half an inch in the stone. With his magic—scratch that, just with how he _moved_ —Karkat didn’t have a feather’s chance in a windstorm of putting up a decent fight, but fuck if he wasn’t at least going to take some of those pretty fingers with him.

 _He’s safe_ , whispered through his mind. _He’s not going to attack you, back down._ At the same time, his instincts ordered, _kill anything that challenges you_. Karkat balanced on the thin line between impulses, about to move, thoughts rapidly disintegrating into a haze of aggression.

“Wait, what _were_ we talking about?” John demanded. Karkat’s sickle was in hand. He didn’t remember it getting there, and he couldn’t look away from the other troll. “Oh right! You were going to explain why the most talented threshecutioner prospective we’ve got wants to go get his throat slit like a common thief.”

In his state, growling was a fucking pathetic sound, like a dying engine. And Karkat was too thirsty to keep it going, so it kept dropping off at weird intervals. This didn’t stop him. It was reflexive.

Just because he’d accepted his death didn’t mean he wanted people fucking… talking about it!

_Take him out._

(And Karkat had. Accepted it.)

“You could be so much more than this.” Karkat’s head snapped towards John, furious. The other troll’s voice rose. “Jegus Christ, Karkat! Where are you getting confused? Half the members in the audience wanted to poach you for a different division after the show you put on—they were comparing you to the Blade of the Empire! They were calling you a Decorated!”

Let’s play a little game here: which was more preposterous? The fact that John was trying to convince Karkat to live by saying he fought like the Condescension’s chief assassin—the one who was fucking in charge of clearing traitors and mutants out of the imperial ranks (Durgas was terrifying as shit too; nowhere near Karkat’s current skill range)—or the fact that some incredible dumbass was talking about Decorating an auto-cull? Karkat was pretty sure that auto-culls didn’t get fleets of their own. Karkat was pretty sure that auto-culls died in a pool of their own blood. Seemed pretty fucking obvious from where he was standing.

“Oh, get a clue, I could do worse,” Karkat snapped at the other troll. “I’m not the only troll who came to the trials to die with a little honor.”

The smile John bit out made Karkat’s blood boil. “Okay,” he said, advancing a step, driving Karkat flat into the wall—Karkat faltered back slowly, handing his space out like discounted grubsauce. Hating that he was doing it. “First of all, there is no FUCKING honor, Karkat, in having the power to be great and refusing to use it because you got scared.”

Karkat’s lips peeled back from his teeth. He dared John silently. _Say I’m scared again, fucker._

John took another step, and Karkat snarled, absolutely unwilling to give ground. John came chest to chest with him, breathing his air, filling his sight. For a moment, Karkat’s low, shaky growl was the only thing of his own in the space. John’s eyes seemed to stare right through his. Karkat looked for violence, and all he got was electricity fucking burning him from under his skin, and his fingers gripping the blades tight enough to make them ache.

_Move. Attack._

“And second,” John said quietly—Karkat tensed—“You are _so_ full of shit.”

He slipped out of Karkat’s personal space a lot faster than he’d taken it. Karkat’s bloodpusher lurched, his rage punishingly hot, while John—laughed. He was laughing? Karkat nearly swallowed his tongue at the electric sensation that clawed through his ribs; John’s laugh was. _Not_ welcome. “Aw, don’t make that face! I’m just really good at seeing through other people’s lies.” He giggled again, made Karkat cringe. “And you’re not a very good liar, are you? Rather remarkably shitty, in fact, to the point where I applaud you, Karkat Vantas, and your inability to spread falsehoods. Good for you, failing so much!”

“The fuck,” Karkat groaned, frustrated. “What did I lie about?”

“ _Dying_ ,” John announced with a smug grin and the absolutely, positively most lividly condescending tone any living being could accomplish. Karkat wanted to strangle him. John beamed. “There’s no way you’ll let yourself die. The way you react is all, ‘survive at any cost! Beat the enemy! Mini badass for the win!’”

The bastard actually raised the pitch of his voice to mimic Karkat. And made a fist. Which he shook at the ceiling playfully. Karkat wasn’t even growling anymore. He was staring in complete horror.

“You really had me going for a minute there, though. But I so called it. I knew you’d be interesting, and now Dave owes me twenty caegars!”

All Karkat could muster at this was, “You were _betting_ on my death wish?”

“Hm? No,” John flapped a hand absently at him, and got distracted fixing a crease in his sleeve. “We were betting on whether I’d have to go get you or you’d walk out yourself. Your death wish is too stupid to bet on.”

Karkat’s thinkpan tripped over itself and fell out. The rage evaporated, and he was just left with his bloodpusher chugging way too hard. _Go get you_. He’d waited first, wanting to see Karkat dragging his broken hide out of the cell and fuck, fuck, fuck, he was talking like he knew Karkat would be able to do it. Like this was no less certain than the fact that John had said “go get you” like if Karkat couldn’t walk on his own, John would… find him.

Karkat was shivering _to his ears_.

“Oh right!” John’s claws were suddenly under his nose, and at a snap of his fingers, the wind kicked up. It made a _thoof_ sort of sound, and the only reason Karkat realized he wasn’t touching the ground anymore was because he was looking at the other troll’s smile from the wrong angle.

He was flying.

Holy flamboyant god riding in on a cheese sandwich, FLYING?!

John floated up to join him. Karkat transferred his gaze from the floor that apparently could not be bothered anymore, to the troll who had Karkat completely under his control. A chill shot up his spine.

“Good job,” John said approvingly. “You’re not grrflailing at all. That’s good, because you are so done standing on that leg.”

Was it anywhere near his choice how Karkat chose to fuck himself over? No. In fact, Karkat wanted to be dancing a murder jig right now, and John should be _putting him down_. The drop wouldn’t kill him, Karkat had jumped from higher, but you couldn’t just say goodbye to gravity without so much as a final fuck you. This was magic. Karkat felt like he’d fall if he thought about it too hard.

John waggled fingers. “You wanna hold my hand? If you’re uncomfortable being up here.”

Luckily for everyone, Karkat’s default setting was blisteringly sarcastic.

“But John,” Karkat pointed out. “Then my sickles would be in gutting range of your vital organs.” John laughed again. Karkat sucked in a breath, hands rising nervously as he realized the wind was blowing him forward. Oh god. Could they not be moving?

And then he made the mistake of looking over at John. Karkat honestly forgot that he was currently enchanted as fuck.

“What do you think of flying?” John asked. “Pretty amazing, huh? It’s okay to be overwhelmed your first time. We can take a time-out anytime you need to.”

Karkat’s voice came out hoarse. “It’s okay. I guess.”

John halted in midair. “Okay?”

It was different being up here, feeling it. Falling felt like it could be as easy as breaking the atmosphere. When Karkat wasn’t looking up, John didn’t move, he just—he was like some kind of seadweller that had just dove back home. Did that make sense? The way John moved on the ground was clumsy compared to this. And god, he knew it; he grinned like his skin fit him again.

So Karkat tilted his head back and sneered at him like he wanted to be dropped. “I’m pretty sure I could _limp_ faster than this, John.”

The other troll’s teeth flashed. The winds shrieked and Karkat let his hands fall.

Faster than running—faster than it should be possible to move. All the breath from Karkat’s lungs got caught in their transportation (he couldn’t breathe). And the thing was, he was just as allergic to gravity and everything was effortless. It didn’t so much as jostle his leg, and they were doing a fucking barrel roll at a speed Karkat couldn’t imagine using for anything but unceremonious death. He _got_ it. He got every bit of what had John smiling like Alternia’s biggest dingus. Karkat was gasping, ears snapped to attention, the electricity of John’s magic kicked up to eleven. John’s eyes got round when Karkat looked at him and he blasted them forwards, whipped them around a corner. God, even _faster_.

Suddenly: trolls. Shit! Trolls ahead, shit—but before Karkat could even shout a warning, John wove the pair of them out of the way, like two point five seconds was more than ample time to calculate trajectory and velocity. He laughed as Karkat swore. “Where are we going?” Karkat asked, having to shout to be heard.

John’s grin was wild. “Nowhere!” He shouted back, washing Karkat’s spine in electricity as he spun them around another corner.

And because John was flying him over the ground like incompetence deserved a fucking reward, and acting like he had no need to actually protect his vital areas, Karkat was alright with reminding him, “I have a busted leg, you know?” Even if he fucking never wanted to get back down. He snorted as the thought occurred to him, “Hey, does sopor do bones?”

“What? Don’t be dumb.” John rolled his eyes. “Haven’t you ever broken bones before?”

Karkat’s ears flattened and he bared his teeth. _I can fuck you up_ , this expression emphatically declared. John just tilted his head. “The sopor stuff. That’s new.”

They wobbled several feet higher and the wind spun like it wanted to become a twister. Karkat yelped while John shouted, “oh!” and suddenly dropped back into Karkat’s space. “So that’s why you seemed so confused before! You’ve never seen sopor—“ he blinked. The winds faltered. “You’re feral?”

“Sure,” Karkat muttered. Close enough. “Is… sopor common?” If it was, that hadn’t helped the drowned prospectives too much.

“Oh man,” John fluttered even clsoer. They didn’t have to shout anymore, but he was still talking loud and fast, like there was a premium on his fucking voice. Karkat glowered.

“This explains so much! I didn’t think there was such a thing as a troll that didn’t love sopor, and you were looking at it like it was toxic. Dude. _Karkat_.” Aaand they were touching. Karkat, instantly, punched John in the side. John just tightened his grip. “Yeah, Karkat. Sopor is common. We sleep in it every night.” He stared. “You’ve… really never used it?”

No, Karkat was just dredging up his massively fucked-up past in a really hilarious joke right now.

Sopor felt spectacular, though. Karkat remembered the unbelievable, snapping force in his well-rested muscles. It turned the corners of his mouth up a little. “I guess I get why you guys like it so much,” he allowed.

“No kidding,” John shot back. His eyes were huge and fascinated. “How do you stay so calm, if you’re not using it? How do you handle the aggression?”

Well. Karkat generally handled aggression by not stabbing people. Although _that_ did make him think back to rushing into his cell and… not being able to find his anger. Getting scared instead, and having to run away. He shivered, unsettled. Maybe sopor wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“My lusus,” Karkat said shortly. “He’d fuck me up if I started acting like a dumbass. Taught me to control it.”

“See, that’s another thing.” The winds whooshed, gently leading Karkat forward while John faced him and flew backwards without a care. He wove them around a column without so much as blinking. Holy shit, Karkat didn’t know whether he should panic or be impressed. “I thought feral trolls weren’t supposed to have lusii. Didn’t you lose yours?”

“Not exactly,” Karkat grumbled. He couldn’t focus enough to shut his damn mouth, so he ended up babbling. “He… just wasn’t a fan of company, okay? So we lived out way in the middle of fucking nowhere. He kicked me out last week—“ Karkat broke off, grimacing. He looked over at the other troll.

If sopor wouldn’t fix his fucking leg, he was screwed no matter what. John stared at him, openmouthed, curious, harmless. Clearly an idiot. Karkat’s dropped his eyes and sighed. Fuck.

John was right. Karkat didn’t want to die, goddammit. He was going to drag it out to the end. Spectacular. Not even he was a big fan of himself at the moment.

“—I don’t get you guys,” Karkat finally sighed. “Trolls. This is the first time I’ve actually met any of you, and you’re all fucking weird.” _You never to kill me, John. What is_ wrong _with you?_

John was silent for a moment, and then his hand was on Karkat’s shoulder again. This time, Karkat allowed it. So other trolls really could touch each other like they didn’t want to be hurt. It kind of made him want to twitch. John let loose a single, breathless, “Whoa.”

“Yeah, so,” Karkat scratched an itch between his horns with the blunt edge of a sickle. GET OFF THIS TOPIC, KARKAT. “…You said that trolls here would give me water? Maybe a little food…?” He peeked at John out of the corner of his eye. He had no idea why John was looking like Gristmas had come early this year, but tried not to let it unsettle him. Priority one was water, because it felt like Karkat’s head was going to explode. Priority two was seeing about splinting his leg or amputating it or whatever seemed the most likely to give him a chance in tomorrow’s fight (fuck all the executioners up the auricular sponge clots, anyway).

All this troll bullshit was very firmly all the way over in the distant recesses of priority three, and Karkat wasn’t even going to bother until he had reason to believe it was even slightly relevant.

“Oh man,” John finally said, and ruffled Karkat’s thoroughly crusty hair. “You’re killing me here!”


	8. Gorged on Poison

According to John, prospectives got this huge nutrientblock all to themselves. Yeah fucking right, was Karkat’s opinion—until he was floated into literal heaven.

There was water. There was a fucking _lot_ of water, and it didn’t smell like anything dead. It was transparent too, no color in it that Karkat could see. Cold enough to make Karkat’s tongue numb and he tried (and failed) to drain the supply. He could have taken an _ablution_.

He could have happily curled up by the tanks of it and never moved, but oh no, Karkat had started hallucinating food.

Steaming hot. Laid up in a line. No visible guards. Enough for the entire army, and not just nutrient paste either. There was meat. Oh god, the MEAT.

This could be nothing but a hallucination.

John assured Karkat that he didn’t have to pay for it. “It’s free for prospectives. You sign up for the test, and your board and feeding are taken care of. All the medical stuff too. Didn’t somebody tell you this?”

Karkat had been more concerned with the fact that he was signing up for his inescapable death than whatever… bullshit wisdom a bunch of menacing adults were trying to impart to his still-breathing corpse. So John could just shut up and stop acting patronizing. Oh god, the MEAT.

No, seriously, how long had it been since Karkat had eaten something that had been capable of ingestion?

He eyed the food, awestruck. Karkat had sucked down enough water that he felt like a bloated bloodsucker, ready to burst if John so much as nudged him, still utterly reliant on the troll to keep him in the air. There were several trolls in this dining hall. Prospective survivors. Not useless in a fight. At least one of them Karkat recognized from the drowning attempt.

And you know what? Hydrated and smelling a fuckload of food, he didn’t care. They could kill him. They could kill him a lot. Was that cluckbeast? Oh god fucking _yes_.

“It’s poisoned, isn’t it,” Karkat breathed, staring at the buffet.

John snorted a laugh beside him.

The meat was glorious.

“That’s pretty amazing,” John observed as Karkat surrendered to fate. “Wow, you sure can fit a lot into your mouth. Do you even remember that your leg is broken? Just checking. Oops, I’m pretty sure there was a bone in there… and you’re chewing through it, okay. You don’t even remotely care, do you?”

This whole gorging himself senseless on clearly poisoned victuals would have been vastly preferable without the commentary. Or the wall of skin at his side on the feeding bench. Why the fuck John didn’t just strand him and leave, Karkat had no idea. But he was done trying to fathom trolls.

He just wished he could focus on eating and not twitching all over the place every time John shifted because he was close to Karkat, unfamiliar to Karkat, and therefore out to get Karkat. Rather than that, Karkat would like to focus on optimizing his protein intake. He had it all worked out. Experience told him he could make it another three plates without his gut actually rupturing, and then maybe he could find a hole or an abandoned pile to burrow himself into. He could hibernate briefly, digest the food, and maybe put up a decent fight when people finally figured out where he was. He’d live longer than estimated. And maybe he’d die a little taller too, which would be fucking awesome.

Yesss. Good plan, Vantas. Go with that.

The door at the end of the mess hall banged open as Karkat chewed. Karkat’s head jerked up automatically. A few more prospectives spilled in—none of them made eye contact, so he didn’t foresee any challenges—and… wait, were those guards?

Shit. Fuck. Why. Why did his life do this to him? Why, when he’d finally, finally gotten something to eat?

“Oh no, are you slowing down already?” John mock gasped beside him while Karkat froze over his cluckbeast leg. “Don’t give up, Karkat! I’m sure you can double your body weight if you really try!”

Shit. Commander Zahhak was walking in. He sure as dinglefuck wasn’t a prospective, so what the hell was he doing here? Had Karkat bled on the cell floor after all? Most undoubtedly. Karkat hunched in on himself, dropping his head to let his overgrown hair hang down in front of his face. He wasn’t much to look at. Maybe Zahhak wouldn’t recognize him and would just go away.

“Karkat? You’re not actually getting sick, are you?” Oh, could John just fucking shut up?! And stop sounding so disgustingly concerned, god, was he trying to summon a whole choral arrangement of humiliation upon Karkat before he died? Bad enough Zahhak would get the honors of the kill. That fucker. “Oh man. Are you going to throw up?”

“John,” Karkat hissed through his teeth, shoulders inching up farther. His ears kept trying to twitch up from their unassuming, flattened position, all the better to track Zahhak with. Zahhak, who appeared to be making a beeline right at them. “ _Shut up_.”

Well, okay. You know what? This could work. So what if Zahhak was supposed to be this existentially OPed badass? Karkat had, er, the element of surprise. And all these shiny metal weapons! He didn’t really know what they were for, but John had made him grab a handful after loading up plates of food. They were sitting on a napkin right next to Karkat. Easily in range to be grabbed. Come on, Zahhak, just a little closer…

(Please don’t get any closer. Turn around.)

“…What? Come on, say it again. I didn’t catch that.” John bumped into Karkat’s side, jolting every nerve in Karkat’s system. Fucking, useless, stupid, DUMBASS TROLL! Karkat rattled off a nervous hiss, barely managed to avoid driving his tiny knife-thing into John’s jugular vein instead of its intended target. Zahhak was right fucking on top of him. Now or never, Karkat!

Take him out!

Karkat squeezed his eyes shut, wanting to hide. John grunted with concern, touching Karkat’s shoulder, drawing attention to them—oh god, Karkat wanted to claw his eyes out just for that—and Zahhak’s footsteps stopped.               

Right in front of them.

“Oh,” John said softly, going still next to Karkat. Karkat held his breath, and prayed to troll Jegus that for just the next few seconds, John would somehow amass the brain cells necessary to not say Karkat’s name eight times in a row. He shivered, fingers knotted over the knife. Out of nowhere, John called, “Hey, Commander! Fancy seeing you here.”

 _…FUCK YOU, JOHN. Just. Fuck you so much_. Karkat shuddered out a hiss of breath, slapping a hand over his eyes because that seemed a little more subtle than tackling the brainless little idiot under the table.

 “Step away from the abomination.” Karkat expected it. He was even prepared to react. He couldn’t run—he’d have to fight. Have to fight Zahhak himself and however many guards were trailing after him. He sucked in another shaking breath. Tensed.

And it didn’t happen.

“Egbert,” Zahhak said instead. Karkat flinched. Was that some kind of troll code for ‘cull immediately’? When no stabbing pain followed, he pricked an ear up.

“Yeah, hi,” John said. He felt warm and limply relaxed at Karkat’s side. Karkat also realized, viscerally, in his adrenaline-numbed extremities… that John had laid a hand over his, pinning the knife to the table (fuck). “Do you want something, or did you just come to say hi?”                

Oh god. John **Egbert** was doing the friendly thing with Zahhak. Karkat was wrong—it wasn’t just him getting killed this evening. In fact, he might only die because he was sitting too close to John when the commander swung his fist at the insolent friendfiend and turned both of their heads into a squirting pulpy mess. No one tried to be congenial with the commander. If you were anything other than a growling hunk of muscle—if you so much as walked by someone without thinking about eviscerating them—Zahhak would know. And cull you on the spot. John was _such_ an idiot.

“I did not come looking for you specifically, no,” Zahhak answered. He’d somehow, between the trial and Karkat filling his stomach, attained an understanding of volume control. And John was carefully prying the knife out of Karkat’s rigid fingers. This did not compute.

Wait, so. Back up. John on a friendly basis with Eqiuus ‘I Fucking Sweat Tradionalist Values’ Zahhak?! John was as irritatingly non-violent a troll as Karkat had ever seen. HOW. More importantly, why the fuck wasn’t Karkat stabbing either of them?

He growled under his breath, scrabbling for control of the knife. A brief, silent war followed, and John’s voice was a little strained when he replied, Karkat sinking blunt claws into his wrist, “That’s interesting. So, is there… _something_ —“ ow, shit, John had bony knuckles— “I can do for you?” He mashed the heel of his wrist down on the joint of Karkat’s thumb. Reluctantly, Karkat relinquished the knife and his hand slunk, defeated, towards his own lap.

“Perhaps,” Zahhak conceded. “I noticed you attended our trials today.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” John’s voice went silky and fond. He nudged Karkat slightly with his elbow. Unless he wanted Karkat to remove it with his teeth, he should stop doing that. Karkat’s fingers edged surreptitiously towards another of those miniature weapons. “Good turnout this year, huh?”

John was an idiot. Karkat could probably take him out without much trouble, windy powers aside, as long as he downed the commander first.

“Indeed.” There was a creak—oh _please_ , not even Karkat’s life could hate him this much. Do not let Zahhak be sitting down with them. Karkat held his breath and somehow, the bench across from him remained empty. “However, in the commotion I’m afraid I lost track of a prospective I was… rather eager to speak to.” Karkat went very still. “I’m sure you know the one I’m referring to. Prospective Vantas. I believe he calls himself… the Carcass?”

Karkat’s blood ran thin and cold as his fingers closed over his second best weapon. Zahhak hadn’t recognized him.

 _John_ , he clenched his teeth together, and fucking prayed. _Do not tell him. Just—be your weird fucking self for just a little longer. Don’t want me dead. Don’t sell me out._

 _Weren’t you the one who said I didn’t want to die? Don’t fucking make me!_                

“I don’t think he calls himself that.” John’s voice was rich with amusement. Enjoying watching Karkat squirm. Karkat let out a breath, defeated. The other troll’s hand landed on his back, compelling him to stay down and await his fucking fate.

Karkat’s shoulders slumped.

He could hear the smile as John said, “Karkat Vantas, right?”

So John had come to his senses. That was okay. Return the favor. Come on, Karkat, show them what you _can_ do.

John let out a yelp of surprise—like he hadn’t expected Karkat to react at all. Karkat threw him off, sweeping the plates after him to give John something to worry about for the next five seconds. Caught a flash of Zahhak’s ugly mug, twisted in its perpetual grimace, saw his eyes for real behind the shades. Blueblood asshat. Drove his good leg into the table and absolutely ignored the immediate retaliation from his injury, and the way it clawed pain up to Karkat’s eyeballs. Heard John shout indignantly behind him, “Oh for goodness sake, Karkat! _Put down the fork!_ ”

Slammed into Zahhak hard enough to sprawl them both on the floor. Managed to accomplish this with the trines of this ‘fork’ digging into Zahhak’s jugular. One burst of pressure and Zahhak would be bleeding out spectacularly. God, Karkat wanted that. A drone was good, but taking down the commander of the threshecutioners would be fucking magic. Karkat would have the proudest death of the sweep. Immediately, he jammed the weapon inward.

“KARKAT!” John shouted behind him, furious. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there are other updates--at least two completed oneshots, and the Trekkie stuff--but oh my god, editing is the worst thing IN THE WORLD. I couldn't save this chapter. Nothing could save this chapter. I want to sleep, so I give.  
> I leave you with Karkat and his splendid murderfork, and John's cruel betrayal. I will update more speedily next time, probably, I promise nothing.  
> I'm going to sleep for a few years, excuse me.


	9. Loathesomely Insubordinate Fiend

...And Karkat fucking hesitated.

Long enough for wind to whip around him. Wrench him away and throw him back, off of fucking Eqiuus Zahhak, who was apparently John’s best friend in the entire fucking shitpool of Alternia. They probably had some disgustingly sloppy quadrant thing, didn’t they, goddamn it, Karkat couldn’t _believe_ he’d flinched! John caught him in midair and shoved Karkat down into the bench, wide-eyed and looking like a real troll this time. Nothing but angry. The fork clattered out of Karkat’s numb fingers, and yeah, shit, he was really going to throw up, wasn’t he? His leg hurt so badly. Groaning, Karkat curled in on himself.

“Don’t even think about it,” John snapped. Karkat blinked open an eye and saw John actually baring his fangs—one of Zahhak’s guards faltered back like this was in some way terrifying. Karkat wondered if it really was. His vision was blurring out and he couldn’t really see. Man, he hated John. Didn’t know what was more repulsive—that John really had turned him over to Zahhak (anyone but fucking Zahhak) or that he’d been holding out on Karkat all along and Karkat had… almost fallen for it.

“Vantas?!” Zahhak exclaimed. Yeah, grubfucker, now you catch on. God, he was stupid. Karkat had no idea why someone that stupid had the luck to live and Karkat didn’t. He growled a little, into his knees, purely reflexive. He figured he could be dying in a pool of his own blood and he’d still have a spastic death twitch in his squawk blister to growl at Zahhak.

“Okay, no, seriously,” John’s voice, at least, was not to be argued with. “Everybody needs to calm down right now. Karkat is hurt and jumpy from the fight—I’m sure he didn’t mean to do that.”

 _Way to make me sound not like a complete waste of skin, John_. Fuck John, by the way. Karkat had meant to roll around and paint himself in Zahhak’s blue blood and laugh hysterically while getting stabbed to death by guards. John was an asshole. Additionally, thanks for broadcasting to the entire empire that Karkat was an invalid. He really needed that. Some of the palace vermin might not have noticed yet, and ignorance was a terrible fucking thing.

The little fuck was just lucky he was out of clawing range. And that Karkat was panting too hard to do much more than shiver and occasionally choke out a reedy little growl that not even a wriggler would have flinched from.

"And Karkat.” John actually growled at him. “Try to act like you have a working thinkpan for two seconds, okay—? Oh my god, would you stop snarling?”

Pot, kettle, fuck you.

Zahhak was getting up. Naturally, he’d get to stand while he slayed the hell out of Karkat. Karkat would have had to make do with being slumped on the floor, hacking away with that ‘fork’ thing. Karkat was full of petty resentments as he looked up and tried to slaughter the commander with the heat of his glare. He growled again. Didn’t matter what John did this time; if Zahhak got anywhere in range, Karkat was going to have to try to kill him. Instinct and logic agreed it would be for the best.

“Allow me to see to his discipline,” Zahhak said. _What?_ Oh, so they were going to have fun with Karkat first?! Karkat glanced at John in utter loathing before Zahhak faced Karkat and cleared his throat.

Karkat figured out what was coming in just enough time for the blood to drain out of his face.

The highblood growl. Zahhak was going to make Karkat grovel.

“Prospective Vantas—“

No—not this time, he didn’t get to make that Karkat's last action. Karkat gritted his teeth to it, and resisted. Keyed up like this, Karkat’s entire body went rigid, straining under the compulsion. He tried to scream, to somehow stop the growl from getting to his ears, and couldn’t. Tried to claw his ears off, and all he could do was make his fingers twitch. Panted, senses sliding into a vortex of confusion, disjointed and confused. “ _Stand down_ ,” Zahhak ordered with the horrible sound. The only solid thing in the room. The only lifeline Karkat had. Grab and cling.

Karkat caught splinters of Zahhak’s surprise, and of John—he wasn’t sure if it was real. He thought John might be smiling like before, all harmless and comfortable, eyes shining. _“Whoa.”_ That didn’t make sense, though. John had been pissed before. Zahhak, though... Karkat could see the commander clearly. He looked downright unnerved.

Instead of taking any sort of deferential posture before his killer, Karkat was clawing his way upright, growling. Try to get at his enemy. Fucking it up, because he couldn’t see and it felt like his ears were full of congealing blood. Because his leg was trashed.

“Prospective Vantas!” Sharper, this time. Much harder. Flashes of reality—color and sound—kept stabbing into the mess of Karkat’s thinkpan. Other trolls. There were all kinds of trolls here, staring at him. Watching him die (he wanted to die alone). Karkat was definitely dying. Always had been. “Vantas, you _will_ stand down! On your knees IMMEDIATELY!”

Karkat thought he maybe swiped his claws at the commander—didn’t connect, because if he had a chorus of fucking angels would have come down and worshipped him. Something touched the back of Karkat’s head. Ghostlike, barely there; anything more would have been drawn into the overwhelming roar of his other senses. But this touch was just within the limits of what Karkat could stand without hurting. It was the polar opposite of that reverberating growl in his head. It didn’t push or yank. It asked.

_Calm down?_

Zahhak growled again, until Karkat’s thinkpan felt fractured. He couldn’t even hear the words anymore. Just the overwhelming compulsion to lie down and wait quietly to die. He pushed back against the hand, panting _. Calm down._ Fuck.

His strings seemed to cut themselves. Karkat sank to the floor, teeth clenched, claws dropping back to his sides. Shaking way too much, all over. His muscles felt like overcooked pasta. John whispered to him again, “Yeah, that’s it, Karkat. Calm down.”

He really was smiling, Karkat registered, as Karkat slumped to kneel like Zahhak wanted. John was smiling at him, hand cupped carefully to the back of Karkat’s head. Acting like this was okay. Karkat blinked. John was… bleeding. He’d been… those were claw marks.

Karkat’s throat went tight. He wasn’t growling anymore. “It’s okay,” John assured him, crouched down on the floor in front of him, keeping his hand put. All those sharp, terrifying fucking knifeblade claws… Shit, Karkat already knew John hadn’t struck back. Karkat would be freaking the fuck out if his skin had been broken, and he wasn’t. Not like Karkat could have stopped any attack with his vision busted by Zahhak’s growls either.

John hadn’t even _tried_.

“You are the worst troll,” Karkat choked out. John laughed a little, and then looked away—being cut off from his gaze dropped Karkat out of the fog and back into his body for real.

Holy fuck, HIS LEG. He had been standing on his leg, oh god, how bad could dying even be?

John was looking at Zahhak. Karkat was not convinced that he couldn’t get back on his feet just to punch the highblood. “There we go,” John said, grinning at the commander. “I think Karkat’s done trying to kill us now. You okay, Eqiuus?”

Eqiuus? John called him—oh, you know what? Why was Karkat even pretending to be surprised?

“I am intact,” Zahhak said, in a voice like he’d just been punched in the eye. “Egbert, you are not. You have been injured by this—this—“

Karkat didn’t get to find out what Zahhak though he was, because John interrupted smoothly, “Nah, I’m good. I don’t want to have him punished or anything, so let’s just call it an accident.”

Karkat blinked at the floor. Wait. Punishment? He kind of hated himself for hacking up someone who hadn’t fought back, but… why the hell would Zahhak care? Unless…

Oh, no way. Karkat lifted his head enough to squint at Johns’ skin again. His vision was still a little blurred and all that anger had dimmed the colors, but…

Yeah. At the very least, that was a cool spectrum color welling out of the cut. Fuck. John was a highblood? Like _Zahhak_?!

“I need a towel,” Zahhak muttered, staring between Karkat and John. One of his guards produced what was possibly the largest towel Karkat had ever seen and Zahhak mopped his face with it. “I see. You are—you are fond of this despicable lowblood, John Egbert? Who… resists the commands of his betters and—“ How had Zahhak gone through that towel so quickly? He handed it back to the guard, who… apparently had a limitless supply.

“I need a moment,” Zahhak declared, and attempted to smother himself in the new towel.

Karkat’s eyebrows rose.

“Yeah, you take your time.” John flopped on the floor next to Karkat. “Oh, and can you tell Karkat you’re not trying to murder him? He seems to think you want him culled.”

Zahhak frowned coldly. Karkat hissed back. Yeah, don’t count on that, John. Zahhak obviously was after his head—

“Of course not,” the highblood announced. “I came here to extend my apologies for the faulty opponent in Vantas’s trial. Why would I ever wish to cull such a loathsomely… _insubordinate_ fiend?” He shivered. Karkat, mouth hanging open slightly, stared as Zahhak continued to try to flood the room with his bodily fluids. He tried to say something, but either that was also against the compulsion on him, or Karkat was just that stunned.

“Gnuh,” He managed. John patted his shoulder peaceably. The wizard was scrubbing at his cheek with his sleeve, smearing that rich blood color all over the place. A color he’d almost been killed for, but that meant he would always, without question, be better than Karkat.

Karkat still couldn’t see quite what shade it was, but it was definitely impressive. Maybe up there with Zahhak’s. Which Karkat didn’t particularly want to think about.

“You don’t eat with the fork, but you’ll try to kill Eqiuus with it?” John rolled his eyes. “You sure are something, Karkat. How’s the leg?” His tone implied that whether or not Karkat’s leg fell off, it would be his own fault. His hand stayed stuck to the back of Karkat’s neck, petting the lank, sweaty hair that curled there.

“Fuck you,” Karkat wheezed. John grinned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Equius, Equius, Equius... You are a delight and a treasure to us all.  
> Also, my fellow shippers, I am proud of the head-touching scene. All of you will shoosh and bow down before me. It was awesome. I demand at least one squee per customer.


	10. Exceptions to the Rule

Zahhak clarified with his usual volume-challenged tones of condescension, “it seems your drone was defective, and retained programming such that it would provide a greater challenge than necessary.”

Massive fucking understatement. Karkat narrowed his eyes, since he could tell his throat wasn’t listening to him with John’s claws lying closer than Zahhak’s teeth. He kept trying to growl, and John kept scratching behind his ears.

“Though you may have disregarded your explicit instructions and damaged imperial property,” Zahhak continued a little more sourly, glaring, which wasn’t really a change in facial expression so much as a difference in vocal tone. “Your inferior fighting skills left you with little alternative.”

_Hey_ , thought Karkat, bristling, at the same time as John announced serenely “That’s crap. You were all flipping out about him whooping ass, and you know it.” To Karkat, he lowered his voice and whispered, “The evaluators were like _goofy cluckbeasts_ up there.”

“However,” Zahhak snarled, stepping closer (and ignoring John, which made Karkat feel pettily content). “There is no justification to be had in the whole of our intergalactic empire that may compensate for _assaulting your superior in rank and blood_ , and even daring to…” Zahhak seemed overcome here. He gestured at John. A guard handed him another towel. Karkat got the point.

“Bluh,” John muttered against Karkat’s side. “Didn’t hurt.”

…Okay, if Karkat could _move_.

“However, Egbert seems to have some… fondness for you. For your skills, I presume, and the glory they might one day bright out Empire.” Zahhak cleared his throat to say with a flourish, “Because John Egbert is in all ways an exemplary troll.”

Karkat stared at Zahhak. If he was going to claim John was an exemplary troll, would he maybe provide a detailed map of how in the fuck that worked? Since when was trolling about friendliness and a lack of self-preservation instincts? Seriously, _where_?

“That’s very nice of you to say,” John observed. His hand kept Karkat from growling out exactly what he thought of Zahhak’s bullshit. “Isn’t that nice, Karkat? Yep, that’s his agreement face. We appreciate that.”

“Quite.” Zahhak paused, apparently for effect. Karkat, still pinned to the floor by Zahhak’s growl, wanting to be miles from this place and utterly, exquisitely alone, could have strangled him. Douche! “It is on this basis that I submit to Prospective Vantas the following offer: you will be excused from the third trial in the form of official apology, and promoted directly to the rank of trainee, effective upon the completion of a mandatory convalescence period.”

He said this very flatly. Succinct, businesslike, and with no room for protest. He said it like he was reading an essay. _We’re waiving fight three, giving you a title, and sending you to one of those cushy slime pods where no one drowns you for a couple of weeks. Like I give a damn._

That tone almost made it sound like he was not saving Karkat’s life. But the words were all there, in the right order. Karkat’s throat closed again and his breathing went ragged. No way.

On one level, the thrill of acknowledgment, of there being someone in this room who wasn’t Egbert wanting Karkat to live—that was enough. He’d made a highblood look at him, really look, and see something other than trash. Something worth an exception. Something that would stick sour in their throats when they ordered his execution.

Karkat had wanted that more than he’d ever wanted anything since home stopped being an option. So how did you explain his bloodpusher clogging up his throat like this? Because. Because if it was a direct promotion, did that mean Karkat would still have to go through physical testing? If he didn’t.

If he _didn’t_.

Karkat’s breath shuddered out all at once, dragging his head towards the floor. Maybe it was just Karkat’s imagination, but when Zahhak spoke again, his tone seemed a little softer. “In this case, I believe superior performance may outweigh fortitude. You will participate in the ranking duels as a formality, Prospective, and then I _assure_ you I will take personal pleasure in making you regret that you ever hatched during boot camp.” Karkat looked back up with a snarl on his lips. The hard-ass Commander Zahhak was smiling right at him.

John didn’t even have to elbow Karkat, who was staring in discombobulated shock, but he did anyway. Karkat twitched slightly. “Sh—“ Fuck, try again. His thinkpan felt like a melting slice of Swiss cheese. “Thank you… sir?” He sounded every bit as confused as he felt.

“Now then. I am afraid that unlike you, miscreant, I have things to do.” Zahhak sniffed, turning away from the two trolls on the ground. “You should get that leg look at, Prospective. For a warrior to look so pathetic is nowhere near as charming as you seem to think.”

And Zahhak was gone. Karkat continued to slouch dazedly on the floor, distantly proud of the fact that his stomach had somehow kept his food down during all of that. The fork was a few inches away from his leg, which had gone coldly painful and was beginning to feel like it wasn’t part of his body at all. There were several trolls in the hall, and all of them were staring at Karkat. Except for John—

No. Not John. That thought couldn't keep recurring. Karkat glanced at him. John wasn’t just some big, tough troll wizard with a bizarre tendency towards nonviolence. He was a _highblood_. That changed things, because it had to.

John had been watching Zahhak go—he grinned at Karkat when he noticed he was being watched. Apparently unconcerned with the spectacle around them.

“You’re highblooded,” Karkat said, temporarily losing control of his mouth. It made him sound like an unobservant moron—which, honestly, he sort of was. It wasn’t like he hadn’t taken the other troll as a threat and hemospectrum level should have been the first thing he’d worked on. But in his defense, what kind of highblood just… didn’t act like Zahhak?

Not like the lowbloods were much better. They just weren’t condescending about it. They made you dead the old-fashioned way. They didn’t use the damn growls, to say the least.

…Admittedly, neither had John.

At the question, John’s smile froze, and he got a crease between his eyes that made the expression looked forced. “Uh, what, you didn’t know…?” He was still bleeding, the idiot. Feeling embarrassed for John (and, admittedly, himself), Karkat swiped his thumb along his tongue and cleaned the worst of the blood away.

“Never mind,” Karkat grumbled, as John stared at him with huge glassy eyes like that touch had hurt him terribly. “Battle fever. My thinkpan isn’t working right. Ignore me.”

“Kinda hard to do that,” John said, and got to his feet without elaborating, tugging Karkat into the air before his body had shaken off the growl. “Okay, intervention time!” He announced to the entire room. “You’ve had enough for one evening. Time to get you looked at.”

Karkat snorted—looked at? He was already being stared at by loads of potential killers—and John shared a look of wicked delight with him. Look right here, a highblood with a sense of humor—

Fuck it. John wasn’t any kind of highblood. He was just a stupid troll who had faulty aggression capillaries or something. Karkat had another day to live—probably—and he needed John to make him look like the weakest little squeakbeast around, dangling from the wind and trying not to shiver at the way the other Prospectives were looking at him.

“Hey,” Karkat muttered into John’s ear when they were outside of the prospective nutrientblock. “Don’t drop me off at the infirmary.”

John popped his mouth into a wide, sharp ‘o’ of delight. “Aww!” Karkat grunted, abruptly being squashed into the highblood’s side by a powerful arm. “Does widdle Karkat not want to be left all alone? I’ll totally stay with you, dude! We can talk about how you ignored a highblood compulsion!”

“No, ‘widdle Karkat’ wants to splint his own fucking leg and if you ever call me that again, I’m punching the shit out of you.”

“Okay, sorry,” John declared, looking delighted. He took Karkat around a corner very gently, and Karkat obstinately stuck his bad leg out. Fuck. OW. Worth it. It was so

It was not worth it and he was never going to do something quite that stupid again, sheesh.

“So how old are you anyway?” John asked, ignoring Karkat’s little ‘oof’ of pain. “You said your lusus threw you out, right? Happens to us all eventually, but it sure never stops sucking! What are you, six sweeps? Six and a half?”

Karkat glanced upwards. John was looking at him with a wide-eyed, guileless expression that made Karkat instantly suspicious. His ears went back, he showed John all of his teeth once again, to the same uninspiring effect. Karkat glowered out a challenge for John to make a single _fucking_ comment when he growled, “Eight.”

John snorted. “You’re not _eight_.” Karkat just glared. Trolls were supposed to split with their lusii at six or so, according to movies. Karkat was aware. He didn’t want to talk about it. Alternately, if John said so much as another word about his stunted growth… John’s eyes had just gotten really big. “Wait. You’re not kidding?” Karkat growled through his teeth. John’s mouth dropped open. After a moment he observed, “You don’t look eight.” And then, for some reason, he beamed.

“Nooo,” Karkat muttered. “ _Really_? Paint my effervescent shock and awe right over the unwavering flag of my middle finger."  _You don't act like a highblood either._   "Where the fuck are we going?” He asked this because this hall looked strikingly familiar.

“Infirmary,” John replied brainlessly.

He was just slightly out of punching range. This felt very calculated. John threw Karkat a smug look. “You don’t exactly have the best track record about good life choices today.”

“Fuck you, I can manage a splint,” Karkat snapped with what dignity he had left. “The last thing I need is more exceptions. Give me, like a pillow and a walking stick. And some tape.” John was rolling his eyes. Karkat wanted to bite him. “I mean it! Nobody is touching this, or I’ll do a lot worse than tackling Commander Zahhak with a forb.”

John was giving him this vaguely pitying look that made Karkat’s rage bubble up a whole lot worse. “Fork. Please tell me you know what a fork is.”

“Quibble over semantics all you like; I know you heard me, John fucking Egbert.” Karkat fruitlessly tried to snag his claws against a wall. “I’m not letting anyone poke around at _my_ broken bone without approximately twenty fucking knives up against all their squishy bits. If you don’t want to help, fine, just point me in the direction of the prospective supply station.” 

“Karkat,” John said in a silky ribbon of a voice, all persuasion and subtle evil, “The empire needs you, and your leg, and I’m really just doing my best to ensure their service continuation. Also, there’s no supply station for prospectives.”

“John,” the wounded troll replied, “Get it through your calcified fossil of a thinkpan: I would rather just sit on this shitty leg until it breaks _off_ than let random ass trolls touch this useless granite doorstop we’re still calling a limb.” John was giving him this mindlessly pleasant look that made Karkat’s ears flare and his temper start rising. “In fact, fuck it. I’ll just power through it, you shithead. Put me down. I want to hobble off somewhere secluded.” _Where you can’t show up and smile at me. Asshole._

“Oh fine,” John sighed through his nose. “Be a dumbass. I’ll take you somewhere else.” Before Karkat could beat their destination out of him, John added, “I’ll take you to my respiteblock, and you can sulk there until you want to call a nurse.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so now John is hauling our intrepid young hero off to his den of iniquity. What do you think will happen next? *WINKY FACE*
> 
> Also, I'm sorry for this chapter, just in general. There was really nothing I could do with it to make it exciting. It's very transitiony. Maybe one more chapter and stuff gets fun (for me) on a permanent basis.
> 
> Just remember: den of iniquity. Think about that while you try to go to sleep tonight.


	11. This Is the Hard Part

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know. You haven't read this chapter yet, so you don't hate me. YET. But you're thinking about it. Indeed, I feel it in my very soul.  
> And humans, I am proud.  
> Because by the end of this chapter, you are going to want to sock me in the mouth.  
> 

Karkat wrinkled his nose at the very suggestion. John’s respiteblock?

Not that he had anything to worry about entering John’s territory—Jegus, this guy had been haplessly not murdering Karkat for hours now—but even Karkat, with his shitty social skills, knew that it was bizarre to start dragging trolls into your personal space.

Hell, if Karkat had owned one square foot of territory here, he’d have happily fought to the death over his being the only toes to encroach on that space. And here John was all ‘let’s just have you sweat your stink all over my personal property.’

“You are so weird,” Karkat illuminated. John snorted at him and didn’t reply. He brought them down in front of a set of doors and made Karkat cringe. Best thermoregulation conditioning on Alternia—you could pitch him into the Icy Depths and his skin color and temperature would be a single, unquantifiable, bloodless constant—but Karkat wasn’t even trying to look, and he somehow now knew the first six digits to John’s security code. He was going to _blush_.

Fuck, was John ever going to attempt self-preservation?!

“Here we go,” John said, and as the lights switched on, Karkat was floated inside. There was one of those slime pods, a shit ton of posters that Karkat didn’t recognize, and crap all over the floor. Karkat’s skin prickled as all the smells washed around him. He was smelling more than John’s scent. Other trolls showed up in this place, evidently. Frequently.

Karkat questioned John’s idea of how hermitages worked. He’d been promised isolation.

“Make yourself at comfortable,” John said, leaning Karkat against the side of a couch before he headed through a pair of doors to his left—there were several doors, Karkat noted with the unease, and guess who didn’t know the escape routes? Alone, Karkat sniffed at the air a little more, gingerly curious about how his own smell was going to mix. Ugh, he was going to be smelling like he’d been rolling around in the barracks, that was so gross.

Restless, he began to limp across the room, gathering objects and putting them back down again in an anemic pile. Karkat stole a pillow off of John’s sofa, which he huddled over protectively. Tape would help, greatly. Or maybe a scarf or something. He eyed John’s curtains. Karkat’s leg had just become top priority, now that John was gone. It was probably safe to assess the damage before he got back.

Or well, not safe. Safe was a bit of a stretch.

The last time Karkat had gotten himself cut, he’d been barely six sweeps old and it had been because he’d slipped on a fucking magazine and cracked his cartilage nub on the nutrient block counter. Crabdad had pretty much chortled his ass off—Karkat didn’t get so much as a scratch on him during any one of the sadistic training regimens a psychotic lusus came up with, but he couldn’t navigate his way across a level floorpath unless something lethal was clawing at him. Fucking splendid.

Karkat could have handled it better. He’d stayed too keyed up to sleep for almost a week, just prowling and shivering during the day, hacking at anything colored wrong enough to send him into another rage. He had fuzzy memories of fighting Crabdad for a box of printer ink that he had apparently tried to swallow, because that made so much sense. Three cheers for dumbass wriggler Vantas.

If Karkat just took a _quick_ look, it would be fine. He hadn’t suicide rushed anything in his color for sweeps, and being alone was good for his sanity, if nothing else. He’d handle this rationally.

He shifted his leg deeper into the pile, so potential intruders wouldn’t immediately see the wound. Charred smell from it. Definitely burned—and some of the fabric looked like it had been melted into his skin. The best Karkat could do for that was just hacking bits of leg off, though. Which would mean more blood. No thank you. It had to be just a normal burn.

The fabric was crusted with any number of questionable liquids, stained too dark to see if blood was among them. Wouldn’t budge. With another furtive glance around, Karkat licked his thumb wet. Same basic principle as cleaning John’s stupidly high blood; different glands. Karkat shoved his pants leg up until he got to the crusty part, scrunched his face, and groped with his thumb. The way his pants came loose upon contact with his gross mutant spit made it clear that there was definitely blood under there, getting crunched up by his enzymes. And it stung. His skin was broken, not just oozing.

He’d have to wash and bind it before splinting. Stumped, Karkat rolled his pants back down and looked around for any obvious ablution blocks with impenetrably locking doors. John came back just then, with another computer that he prodded at one-handed and, to Karkat’s eternal gratitude, a roll of shiny black duct tape slung around his wrist. Karkat perked up; John stopped walking and snorted on an amused laugh.

“So you take ‘make yourself comfortable’ really literally, huh?” John observed. He spun the duct tape on his finger, aiming a pointed look at the pillow Karkat was hunched over. “Is that big enough?”

No, not really. Karkat shrugged uncomfortably. It would do in a pinch. Karkat just wanted ten or so minutes in the ablution trap, and the duct tape, in that order. He’d be grand in the time it took John to roll his eyes.

“I’m going to regret giving this to you,” John said, and offered Karkat the duct tape, “But since you’re being a whiny dork and apparently going to claw out my ganderbulbs if I keep ‘smothering you with my mangritty affections’—” this said with copious finger quotes. Karkat scowled at the computer. Was there a soul on Alternia John was capable of not informing that Karkat was ripe for the murdering? Also, who _in the fuck_ was encouraging John to not start culling at first sight? God. “—I’m going to give you the tape. I’m going to find you a less shitty pillow. I have some anti-burn stuff somewhere too if you want it—and then, when you’ve made your half-assed attempt at a splint, we’re going to take a trip to the infirmary and they’re going to check that you didn’t fuck up.”

Karkat hadn’t even contemplated burn medication as a possibility. But yeah, nothing like chafing blistered skin every time you moved and having a splint full of itching, molting sheets of chitinous delight. _Nothing_. Self-conscious, he shifted deeper into the pile.

John added, “And if you screw it up, buddy, you get to keep redoing it until you get it right or you pass out, in which case they’re going to splint it for you while you can’t tackle people with forks and everyone will laugh at your idiocy. Ha ha.”

Asshole. But not asshole enough to make Karkat stop feeling reluctantly appreciative of the… the foresight. He had this weird prickly feeling in the back of his bloodpusher, like Crabdad had just thrown breakfast at his head and screed at him.

Karkat looked down, and managed a gruff, “Thanks.”

“Yeah, well,” John huffed, sounding a little gruff himself. He cleared his throat for no reason.

_Hell yeah, feel awkward, John. This is what you get for towing strangers into your hive and letting them pile and make your things stink like them._

John muttered, “I’m not actually _trying_ to make this a hatedate, you know.”

“Wow, no!” Karkat coughed, and immediately regretted wishing awkwardness upon John. He hated this dude, but you know. Platonic hate. He didn’t—Karkat shuddered a little, particularly in that he was suddenly recalling the warmth of John’s arm looped around him and his hand touching the back of Karkat’s neck, which certainly wasn’t any kind of polite zone for kismesitude and just, you know what? He was going to stop thinking about things that weren’t relevant, and also weren’t happening.

“Ablution trap,” Karkat rasped in a stunningly mentally deficient fashion. “Where is it?”

John, flushed a faint bluish color and directed Karkat through another door. In short order, a pillow big enough to smother a drone, two rolls of duct tape, a canister of dermafacture stuff (brought back memories; Crabdad had nearly bathed Karkat in dermafacture during mental conditioning and all the misery that had entailed), and what appeared to be a spear with the tip hacked off, were shoved into his arms. The door slammed shut. And Karkat was alone.

 Right so: farewell to his pants. They had served him well.

Karkat scalped the clothing off with his claws, feeling for the fabric with his fingertips because he couldn’t trust himself to look. The less he saw, the better he’d be able to handle it. He’d rather risk juddering his injury than end up hacking his way through the walls because his survival instincts had the unfortunate side effect of making him behave like a basket case.

_Deep breaths. Focus on the task at hand and squeeze the discomfort out of your thinkpan. You’re doing a puzzle, and it’s an easy one. Just put it back the way it was; you’ve felt your legs under you every fucking day of your life._

He cleaned the wound slowly, first with his anti-coagulant glands, then with the ablution trap faucet, hissing frantically a how badly the water—bitterly cold and numbing—and a broken leg mixed. Soap was worse. Followed by disinfectant. What was _in_ this stuff, battery acid?

But hey, thorough meant less chance of infection or amputation or whatever else happened when your lusus ditched you—and fuck that, _no more_ feeling sorry for himself. It was pointless. Like Karkat had time for it with some kind of pan-melted highblood— _Vantas. **Focus**. This is the hard part._

Karkat preemptively squeezed his claws around the sides of the ablution trap, gave himself firm orders not to let go, and looked down.

Leg. Swelling. Blo—foot. ( _Focus_.)

Mmmh. Not as bad as he thought. Swollen to hell and the angle wasn’t right, but okay, most of the blood was gone. So was a lot of skin, but that. That was _okay_. That didn’t necessarily mean his fucked up color was going to start spilling out of his body. It just meant. He saw it. Again. _Nnrgh_.

_And eyes up!_

Karkat sucked in a deep breath, swelling his stomach out with it, and looked up to the ceiling. Crabdad taught him. All routine. Count to twenty.

_Let go—one hand. Wait._

When he didn’t try to claw the bleeding structure off of him ( _out of me!_ ), Karkat released his other hand and waited again.

No. He was fine. Sickened, but fine. With some effort, Karkat quelled the warning growl he was making and, reassured that the wound was clean, shook up the spray can and began to apply the dermafacture.

In his mind’s eye, where he could still see the color of his blood, Karkat began to painstakingly apply black, making sure that not even he would remember the mutated color that came out of him.

It was the only way to keep from going crazy.


	12. A Really Shitty Fight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. You know the idea I had about updating each fic in turn, one by one?  
> Yeah, well, now I have no free time. You're stuck with whatever I've already written and can edit, because I don't have time to write new stuff.  
> Would you just look at those 20 prewritten chapters of Epic Quest.  
> Guess what you're getting this Spring, Johnkateers.
> 
> Also, I promised legitimate flirting; this is me attempting to pony up. I can feel your judgment. Stoppit.

Guh. Itchy. Itchy, itchy, _itchy_.   
  
Why did itchy have to be a million times worse than painful? Karkat knew it was the good kind of itchy, but damn, plastic molecules binding over a wound was the worst sort of obnoxious and dermafacture synthetic skin was only worth something if he could avoid tearing it to shreds.  At least he was used to it.  
  
Karkat set the bone straight and started bandaging—from the sincerely fucking awkward angle of the other side of his body, with his leg pitching a total snitfit every time he basically drew breath. He was this close to just chopping the thing off to spite himself, but he’d put in too much effort at this point and powered through by vociferously bitching Crabdad out under his breath. In the end, Karkat had his leg wrapped up so snug he deserved medals, with his ankle locked and his toes moving and warm. So shit, that would do, and John could just suck on that particular lollipop of shame until Karkat got tired of gloating.   
  
With his makeshift cane, Karkat was practically in no pain at all. He grinned a little, and managed a slightly lurching circle on the ablution trap floor without crumpling in agony.  The ablution trap was hosed down, then his hands, and the shreds of his pant leg went into his pocket.  With a little effort, the blood color was erased from inside his eyelids.  Karkat remembered to breathe.  
  
When he shoved the door back open and shuffled into John’s respiteblock, he found his troll host stretched out on the sofa, eyes on his computer.  John still mustered an eyebrow-waggling, sleazy smirk. “Ooh, Karkat. Do _you_ ever clean up good.”   
  
Rolling his eyes was inevitable. The original pillow was just where he left it—good, it had been comfy—and Karkat sank in with a pleased sigh. “Hell yes, I do. I am the splinting master.” Just so long as he didn’t have to do another one soon, because if he did he might just save Alternia the trouble and cull himself.   
  
“Showing thigh too,” John observed, craning his neck to ogle the sliver of Karkat’s scrawny-ass leg peeking between shredded pants and a solid log of pillow and duct tape. “Sexy.”   
  
Karkat relinquished his pillow. It bounced off of John’s nose and the highblood was laughing as he relaxed back into the sofa cushions.   
  
“You shouldn't walk too much for now,” John said as Karkat shifted his pile around himself to get a more relaxingly claustrophobic feeling. “I called over that nurse buddy of mine to make sure you're good. Unless you’re going to flip out again over nothing—in which case go nuts, I’ve got HornTube on here.” He waved another of his seemingly endless supply of computers.  Karkat grunted.  
  
One nurse was probably better than subjecting himself to John sheltering Karkat from the rain with his manly shoulders and laying down jackets over puddles and shit to better indicate Karkat’s thoroughly fucked status.   
  
More importantly: “Are you friends with every troll on Alternia?"  Karkat grimaced.  "Seriously, even Zahhak likes you, or at least wants to play toady for you. What the shit? That a highblood thing?"  
  
“Aw, Karkat!” John flipped over to face him fully, grin wide and manic enough to deserve a drawn blade. “Are we friends too?” At Karkat’s growl, John added, “Seeing as you’re a troll on Alternia.”   
  
“Well considering the events of the past few hours, I don’t think I have a lot of say in the matter,” Karkat grumbled. “You refuse to kill me and you’ve dumped my ass in your respiteblock like we’re the tightest moirails outside of fiction. What’s your deal? You get off on making friends with people, you know, before?”  
  
When John’s expression cooled, Karkat snorted. “I know the score, but I'm not out to fuck it up or anything. Just curious. Do you want a better fight or what?”   
  
“Would you believe me if I said it’s not about killing?” Karkat laughed for a moment. This guy was ridiculous.   
  
“Fuck no!” “Then there’s really no point in talking, is there?” Abruptly, John was staring as his computer, entire body shifted towards it and away from Karkat, like he’d been completely severed from existence. Karkat blinked and waited for John to babble something—a lecture or a platitude—and when it didn’t come, he stared.   
  
“John?” No reply. Karkat bristled slightly. Was this some kind of insult? Bring a troll to your hive and then ignore them, like they were too weak to even cut your throat out? What a shitty strategy to not dying before adulthood. Also, the insult was _working_. “Hey! Say something.”   
  
“If you’re bored, just make plans to kill people or something,” John offered, still typing at the computer. “You seem to be into that.”   
  
Karkat flicked his ears dismissively. “Whatever, asshole.” He leaned back in the pile. He thought of Zahhak, who could probably snap Karkat’s spine with two fingers, and went through a few mental replays of their meeting in the nutrient block. How could Karkat have done better, killed Zahhak faster? Incapacitated the guards and escaped?   
  
Well, for one, John could have been _quiet_ —   
  
No, focus, Karkat. Who gives a shit about John? The black drone—it shouldn’t have damaged him like this. Karkat should have brought it down neatly; shouldn’t have aimed for the arms. _Keep that in mind next time—just because you fuck up the obvious weapon doesn’t mean there aren’t more. Yeah, you dumbass wriggler, because apparently you need a refresher course on mutant survival basics_ —   
  
John laughed at something on his computer. Karkat glared over at him, because dammit, he was trying to make plans to kill people, and the second he did, John’s face flickered with something stony.   
  
Okay, to hell with his bullshit.  
  
“Hey,” Karkat snapped. John’s eyes darted over to him too fast to have been anywhere near engrossed in his stupid computer. “If I’m imposing, oh gracious highblood, let me just hie myself fucking elsewhere.”   
  
John scowled and Karkat bristled, ready to fight—John’s scowl slipped—he smiled warmly at Karkat.  Then went straight back to his computer.   
  
What.   
  
Karkat hissed, he growled, he threatened to do several truly vile things to John’s internet connection. The other troll just kept smiling and scrolling, not saying a word. When Karkat’s anger reached seismic levels and he was ascending from his pile to make good on some of his hilariously bad threats, he could see John’s shoulders shaking. The highblood was laughing at him?! Oh, that was the last straw. Karkat was going to drub the troll to death on the spot, slowly, painfully, with the pillow.  
  
John batted him off, laughing audibly now, computer slipped from his fingers as Karkat lurched menacingly and swallowed around his own set of giggles. John clobbered him with a concealed weapon—sofa cushion—and Karkat stumbled backwards into soft upholstery before he reared up and tried to smother John’s giggling. Sharp claws scratched at his sides and Karkat had just enough time to be concerned for his intestines before he was outright shrieking with laughter, thrashing, squirming desperately away from John’s dancing fingertips.   
  
“No—dammit, _fuck_ you—“  
  
John tackled him and they rolled, ignoring Karkat’s leg, laughing and swiping at each other, until Karkat had one offending hand caught in his teeth. John grinned down at him, squashing Karkat into the sofa with cheerful intent and leaned down to nuzzle Karkat’s unprotected face until the smaller troll grumbled at him and released the fingers to snap at John’s nose.   
  
“You’re way too funny to stay mad at,” John declared. Jegus, he was so broken. Sincere death threats to you and your property were in no way funny, except Karkat was kind of grinning too. He hadn’t bothered to draw blood from John’s tickling claws—because high spectrum blood was disgusting and probably toxic and everyone knew it.  Yeah.  
  
But Karkat knew that the smothering, fluffy calm wrapped around him like a giant sweater pile could not have been achieved if John had broken his skin anywhere. They’d just had a really shitty fight, apparently. Which sounded lame, but what else did you even call that?   
  
“You’re dumb,” was Karkat’s answer. Followed by, “I really will hide your computer under a whole stack of buckets.”   
  
John snickered, and dropped his weight. Karkat wheezed as his air got squished out of him. When John let him breathe, he rolled out from under him before he could try it again, and nabbed the sofa cushion. “Mine,” Karkat explained, and made off with it to his pile. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see John’s amused smirk and was satisfied on a very basic, wrigglerish level. “  
  
So what was that? A pillow ambush?” John edged closer, ignoring Karkat’s warning grumble. “Pretty weak, Mr. Tiny, Scary Prospective.”   
  
Karkat sniffed, “You’re one to talk, Flutterclaws.” He pantomimed the non-evisceration technique and growled halfheartedly as John closed the distance between them.  The highblood sat right in front of Karkat, near enough to snatch back his sofa cushion, if he thought he was fast enough. Karkat narrowed his eyes, continuing to warn John off. John was still grinning.   
  
“Your pile looks like crap.”   
  
“Bite your tongue,” Karkat hissed at John’s soft huff of laughter. “Try it yourself, and you’ll concede that my pile-building mastery will earn me honorary placement among the cullcomforters.” John prodded the pile with a finger. Karkat rumbled another warning, telling John that if he got any handsier, Karkat was going to have to insist on vengeance. “I am the piling _god_ of your puny hive.”  
  
“Well,” John propped his head up on his knees, drawing his hands back into his space. He conceded, “My lusus did always tell me that you shouldn’t judge a pile by its symmetry.” Karkat nodded, shuffling deeper into his pile with an exaggerated hum of comfort. John supposed, “I’d need to burrow in it myself to know for certain?”   
  
Karkat’s ears pricked up. Stayed there for approaching two seconds. Went back down. John’s grin had widened a bit and Karkat casually reached up and curved fingers over his ears before they could make him look any more like an incorrigible dumbass. “I guess so.” He cleared his throat.   
  
“Sooo,” John’s bare feet—huh, he’d taken off his shoes—clicked claws against the floor, giving Karkat’s ears still more reason to embarrass him. John’s eyes were too warm to meet. “…May I join you?”


	13. The Dangers of Superior Piling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this sucks less than it's previous incarnation, so I'm gonna go ahead and pretend it's ready for posting.  
> You're welcome.

Karkat’s eyes did not actually pop out of his head.   
  
He cleared his throat. “I guess… so.” John grinned and crawled over him. Abruptly the pile had twice as many elbows—squabbling followed this immediately—and it really didn’t have enough material for the both of them to burrow in it, but then again, Karkat was the supreme pile-builder of Alternia.  
  
John blinked, learning back—squirmed—leaned back again. Closed his eyes.   
  
“So?” Karkat prompted after a moment. John sighed out a huge breath.   
  
“You… weren’t kidding.” Karkat smirked. Hell yes. He’d _known_ he was excellent at this. Whenever he couldn’t sleep, he’d make huge, impractical piles and then go so deep into them he couldn’t help but shut his eyes. He wouldn’t wake back up until he heard Crabdad’s screeches of confusion about why all the cooking implements were stacked on top of his wriggler.  
  
“Never doubt me again.” Karkat settled into John’s side. A part of his mind appraising the troll’s skin texture and the supple-firm way another body fit against his for pile-building materials. If shifted to the left, he would strongly fortify the south wall.   
  
Mostly, Karkat was just comfortable. The look on John’s face said his burrow reflex was getting to him good—he was going to be too out of it to muster any aggression—so Karkat was feeling safe. If it was maybe a little weird for Karkat to invite another troll into a pile he built—let alone a pile he was currently occupying (but fuck if he was going to move; he hadn’t had a pile in _days_ )—this stuff all smelled so strongly of John that it probably cancelled out any territorialism. Or something.   
  
“Holy crap,” John observed, blinking his eyes open momentarily. They were glazed and goofy and when Karkat bumped John’s shoulder with his lightly, on a whim, John giggled. “When you get a moirail, that troll is going to, like…” John pantomimed what Karkat supposed was thinkpan explosion. Karkat’s ears drooped down a little.   
  
Moirail. A gentle shooshing, soft words coaxing him into a long, slow feelings jam—   
  
Okay, it was fucking weird to have pornographic thoughts while you were _actually_ in a pile with someone. Karkat burrowed his head under a shirt, grumbling to himself. Fantasies had never been weird when he was piling alone.   
  
John noticed. “Hey,” he said softly, and bumped their shoulders again. He sounded a little amused. “Don’t look so upset, Karkat! You’re in actual civilization now. You’re going to meet someone awesome here to be diamonds with you.”   
  
Karkat snorted from beneath the shirt. “Yeah, I’m sure one of the prospectives is just dying to shooshpap me into next week.”   
  
“Well, okay, maybe the prospectives are out.” John cackled—reluctantly, Karkat joined. It was pretty much impossible to imagine finding moraillegiance with any of the scarred, snarling prospectives he’d lined up with on his first day. Karkat had been quickly aware that he was the runt of the entire group, and equally aware that the troll to his left was pulling out blowdarts. Glorious. _That_ had been a long orientation ceremony.   
  
“But when the trials are over? You bet you’ll find a palerom or two.” Karkat sighed softly at John’s reassurances. After the trials. Suuure.   
  
There was this part of Karkat that had always believed in serendipitymates. Maybe they’d be like him—auto-culls rescued in some great revolution. They’d stay together and have the deepest, truest romance ever conceived, like they were supposed to. Karkat would be great at that. He’d watched every romance he could get his claws on, and had subsequently amassed hundreds of schemes on how to romance his quadrantmates silly.   
  
Frankly, that part of Karkat tended to eat a lot of ice cream and marathon anything with troll Rachel McAdams. Right now that part of Karkat wanted to scream at the ceiling that none of this was fair. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to someday take a real moirail into his pile and just _snuggle_ until the stars went out.   
  
What a dumbass that part of Karkat was. Let’s all laugh at him and put Kick Me signs on his back. He deserves it, the loser.   
  
“I guess,” Karkat said, shrugging it off. “I mean.” His throat closed a little. “If I survive.”   
  
“Uuuugh!”   
  
Abruptly, John caused Karkat’s pile hideous structural upset. His arms crashed around Karkat and locked him close. “Again with the dying thing! Eqiuus said you’re already in, okay? Get it through your thinkpan. You’re a survivor. You’re a _trainee_.”  
  
“Oh, just shut up,” Karkat grumbled, trying to jerk out of John’s grip without tipping himself out of his pile. Escape was futile, it seemed. John groaned into his shoulder.   
  
“You defeatist little bastard. Listen: I’m not going to kill you. I was never planning to kill you. Say it.”   
  
Karkat just scoffed.   
  
“Oh no!” The highblood exclaimed, jerking against Karkat, sending another cascade of piling materials sagging forlornly to the floor. Karkat glared at the top of John’s head, and then John lifted his gaze.   
  
Karkat’s breath caught. His world stuttered to a halt. His bloodpusher practically whirred, it was slamming so hard. “Karkat, Karkat!” John whined. “I’m being overcome with rage and frustration! All my nasty trollish instincts are coming out!”  
  
“What,” Karkat managed in a squeak, unable to take his eyes off. John was staring up in a way that—he just looked so miserable.   
  
So… _pitiful_.   
  
When John tackled Karkat, trashing the pile, Karkat went down without a fight or a single obscenity, words tangled up in his throat, not breathing, and John hunched over him, looking not the slightest bit angry for all his bluster.   
  
“You know what I’m going to do to you?” He snarled down. Karkat tried to make a noise and couldn’t. Maybe the wind magic? He felt like he’d swallowed a very large balloon, expanding in his chest, ready to make him burst. John was not allowed to give him the redrom eyes. Oh Christ. “You know what I’m going to do right this minute, Karkat, with the force of my undying and impressive rage? What my evil plan is?”  
  
“Gragk,” Karkat said.  
  
John grinned all full of evil—Karkat just barely sucked in a breath—and when John moved, his lips pressed delicately against Karkat’s cheek. Karkat’s yelp dwindled into another breath. The bigger troll leaned back in the remnants of their pile. He declared in a voice that was all growl, soft and velvety, “I’m gonna tell you the truth. Karkat, you are _so_ pitiable.”   
  
Karkat accomplished a full-body twitch and literally nothing else. John’s smirk softened for a moment—not quite the overdramatic, erotically pitiful expression from before. It was worse than that. Was there even the slightest bit of gray matter still sloshing around in Karkat’s brutally demolished thinkpan? Fuck no. He was pretty certain John was saying that Karkat was, you know, pitiable specifically by one person. Named John.   
  
…Potentially, that explained a lot, huh.   
  
Of course, it was understandable for Karkat to assume flirting was the same thing as lethal intention because the warmth in John’s eyes? That was definitely going to do him in.   
  
John shifted forward like he was maybe going to give Karkat another kiss—or maybe check him for a pulse— _oh god oh god_ —and the front door opened. Karkat shot up like he’d been electrocuted.   
  
“Hey, John! You here?”   
  
John tumbled backwards and vanished beneath a heap of knitware, hands flailing in distress. Karkat, operating on some instinctual level, threw himself at the first door he saw. Abscond, abscond, abscond. His leg chose this moment to reenter his life by bitching heartily.   
  
Said door was locked. Fuck everything. Karkat plastered himself to it like he was trying to fuse with the wooden surface anyway. The infirmary nurse from before stopped in his tracks, halfway into the room. “Uh,” he said.   
  
John sat up out of the pile and spat out a sock. He was blushed so dark that Karkat could finally register his blood color—an off-shade of indigo. Karkat’s heart was pounding over an indigoblood trying to scrape the taste of sock out of his mouth. Fuck, and he absolutely knew he couldn’t blush.   
  
The nurse looked between the two of them slowly. Karkat managed a growl that sounded properly vicious, but kept breaking off into this subdued creaking noise, like his aggression capillaries were clogged. The troll offered hesitantly, “…Should I come back later?”   
  
“No!” John exclaimed. He looked over at Karkat with an imploring smile. “No? Come on in, Tavros.” His teeth hung over his lip, Karkat realized. He took this information like a brick to the gut.   
  
He found himself slumped on a sofa cushion in a matter of minutes, with the dazed expression of someone who has been in the trenches and not yet fully returned. The trenches consisted on romantic monologues from troll Colin Firth movies and repeated exposure to the most pitiable, redrom-starring expression he’d ever seen, courtesy of John Egbert’s stupid face. The nurse—Tavros—was checking Karkat’s splint. He didn’t even manage to snarl at Tavros when his damaged leg was touched—what was becoming of his life?   
  
“You, uh, actally did a good job,” Tavros offered. “Any prior medical experience?”   
  
Yes. If Tavros was interested, Karkat also happened to be a living cull, a mutant who was going to die very soon, and who, for the first time, apparently had some pity directed his way, which was igniting his thinkpan like it contained rocket fuel and the contents of a modest distillery.  
  
Basically, John needed to quit staring. His ears were bright indigo.   
  
Once Tavros absconded in blushing, stammering panic, John promptly dumped his face in his hands. Karkat considered the fetal position.  
  
John’s computer chimed and snapped them out of it.   
  
“So, uh, that was somewhat more awkward than I intended,” John observed. Karkat answered this with an utterly blank, desolate stare. John got a little bluer around the ears. He looked so helpless—so exhilaratingly, hypertension-inducingly helpless—that Karkat was expecting to just pass out in a fit of hormones and confusion.   
  
But instead John took a breath and gave Karkat a sheepish, embarrassed smile. “If you want, you could build the pile back up again and, um. Blow your moirail’s mind now. Today. If you want.” Karkat’s head spun. John seemed to wince a little and he said again, “If you _want_. No pressure or anything.”   
  
…A real, _legitimate_ pale piling?   
  
Wait, no, rewind. John was offering to _make a diamond quadrant_ with him?  
  
Well. Karkat’s knees had just gone weak. There was really only one answer he could give.


	14. You're Gonna Get Schooled

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE ARE COOKING WITH GAS NOW  
> The plot is moving forward. Heh. Heh heh.
> 
> One more chapter and the action scenes start back up again.

A living, breathing troll was asking Karkat to the pile. How many hours were spent in heartfelt worship at the altar of the sacred romcom in hopes of this very day? How could you even explain a culturally backwards mutant head case getting _hit on?_   
  
And behold as Karkat Vantas, mere days away from his timely execution, stood there like he’d been hit upside the head with a brick.   
  
“I’m flattered,” Karkat stumbled when he was much more than flattered—like he was even going to have so many opportunities in another 24 hours of life, Vantas, COME ON. “ _Really_.” There was a pause. Karkat wouldn’t shoot himself in the foot by saying something clichéd and uselessly like, “But this is really sudden.”   
  
"Karkat?” John called tentatively as Karkat snarled through his teeth and raked a hand through his hair angrily. “Are, um. You okay?”   
  
“Just peachy,” Karkat raved. “No, wait. Better than fucking peachy—I just literally get the most pan-meltingly romantic speech of all time directed at my scrawny ass. You’re pathetic.” _I’m going to die tomorrow._ “And what do I say?! Fucking ‘too soon’! FUCK—!”   
  
John wheezed. Karkat managed to glare for just a moment before it tapered off into some dumbass pitystruck _thing_. It couldn’t be John snickering that did this to him, right? So why was the air around John inclining Karkat to swoon?! IT WAS AIR, DAMMIT.   
  
“Wow, okay,” John giggled at him. He’d flushed a little darker. “Just a head’s up, dude. If you flirt with me, I will flirt back. And I will flirt back hard. You’re gonna get _schooled_.” He winked.   
  
Karkat’s world ended, just a little.   
  
“I need to think,” Karkat finally managed to say after several deep breaths. “It’s not that I don’t,” he shuddered slightly. “Feel anything.” John was smiling at him.   
  
John always smiled.  
  
Karkat barely remembering to ease up before he bit through his own lip and started a whole new categorical set of issues. John said, “I don’t mind waiting.” Karkat’s bloodpusher fluttered fit to start him flying again. John’s voice was half-growling again. “Tell me how you feel when you get it, dumbass. We’ll go from _there_.”  
  
“Oh good,” Karkat managed, groping for his discarded walking stick. “I’m going to take a walk. You’re not allowed to come.” John’s mouth was already open to protest. Karkat brandished a claw at John authoritatively. “No, fuck you. You’re too—“ He paused.  
  
John smirked a little bit, in a way that neatly turned Karkat’s stomach over. “Oh yeah? What am I?”   
  
Karkat (narrowly) managed not to bite through his lip. “ _You_ are not allowed to leave this room.”   
  
John held up his hands, but still gave Karkat’s leg an unfairly concerned look. _Pitying_. Jegus fucking Christ, was Karkat getting weak in the knees. “Are you sure you’re alright to walk?” Karkat nodded. The splint was doing wonders already. The flood of red hormones numbing everything not attached to swoon receptors also helped. John gave him a highblood’s blue-tinged, wobbly smile. “Okay then. Be careful?”   
  
Karkat huffed out a short, half-gasp of breath and then all but threw himself at the exit. 

\----

  
Mid-evening gloom filled the halls outside, dark as pitch past the windows. A slow stream of trolls drifted by John’s quarters, ignorant of earth-shattering revelations. How remarkable for them. Karkat picked a direction and threw himself at it, limping as fast as he could. He let his mind go blank, and let his body work out the nervous, spiking energy riding through it.  
  
Let himself breathe without choking on John’s soft smiles. Oh god. What if he said yes. Could John stop his bloodpusher like that in any quadrant?   
  
Karkat sagged against the wall. You know what he was? Exhausted. Captain Emotion Explosion of the Windy Order would think he needed to _flirt_ , of course he did. Right after Karkat fought for his life against a black drone and Zahhak _and_ his sick mutant blood. John should have figured this shit out sweeps earlier, drawn by the mysterious force of serendipity to Karkat’s hive where—   
  
—where Crabdad tore him limb from limb for compromising their location. Okay, no; new plan. John had a pity thing. And Karkat?   
  
Karkat had something detonating behind his eyes like he wasn’t allowed to be thinking about this. With his vision hazed, for a moment he was still in the pile. John pressed beside him, murmuring warmly. Thinking of the hand curled around the back of his neck when Karkat was in danger, calming him down. His bloodpusher ached.   
  
That kiss had been half a trick, and really shy in spite of it. Karkat didn’t—he didn’t fucking do shy. He didn’t have time. He wanted to push John into something and _explain his thinking_. At length.  
  
If this was pale, Karkat was a mushroom lord. He was all keyed up—and he had been, right, since the troll had handed him his sickle and blasted off into the sky like a spaceship. Since the infirmary, since _I knew you’d make it out of your cell_. John made him the farthest thing from calm. Karkat wanted to fight.   
  
If John had a matesprit, Karkat would fight for him. Fight fang and claw for however long he had left on the clock, and maybe he’d get to touch John’s hand before he died and feel the flush of their blood thrumming together. He wasn’t going to die a coward. He’d mangled a drone and he could claim a matesprit. Karkat wouldn’t even have the _right_ to resent dying.   
  
(Oh yes he would.)   
  
Karkat began to pace. “I want you,” Karkat addressed the floor, and then cringed. No. Sounded like the start to a porno (not that he ever watched any of those. Noooo). “I’m… interested in your flushed quadrant?” Fuck that. Anyone who said that needed to be punched for being a grubsniffing wuss. Karkat squared his shoulders and spoke from the diaphragmatic compressor. “I think it’s concupiscent!”   
  
Good Prospective Vantas thusly gave into the desire to smack his head into the wall a few times.   
  
When he was done cursing himself with the vitriol unique to a troll enjoying the meaning of the word ‘hormones’, Karkat tried again. “John…” He swallowed. Sucked in a breath. “I thought about it. And I’m flushed for you.”  
  
…Facing his doom was nowhere near this hard.   
  
Karkat breathed. Okay, again, with a little less grubsniffing wuss this time. “Hey asshole, I’m flushed for you!” His bloodpusher actually skipped a beat. Karkat smiled a little, helplessly, shivering with giddy thrill. “I’m completely, massively, ectothermically flushed for you.” Oh yeah. “I’ve got such a huge flush-boner for you that it might not fit entirely into one quadrant—!”   
  
No, too much. Back it up, dumbass.   
  
Karkat eventually did stop beating his head against the wall.   
  
Could he manage not to stick his foot in his mouth when it actually came to telling John that he was flushed beyond physiological conception? Ha, fuck no. But John was already a degenerate. He pitied Karkat Vantas, which sort of implied he likes it when Karkat Vantas said shit. The degenerate probably liked the taste of feet.   
  
Funny thing; stopping in the middle of a hallway with a splinted leg and cracking your head against the plaster a few times did make everyone hurry about their business a little faster. The hall was a lot emptier now.   
  
Deserted, Karkat noticed. Less potential enemies. A comfort.   
  
Fuck, being attached to another troll wasn't going to make being alone feel weird all the time now, was it? Romcoms implied it could come upon him fast, but Karkat didn't feel embarrassingly needy yet.  Karkat glanced around warily, and found himself drawing his ears low. Strangest thing. A growl was building in his throat.   
  
A chill of sweat prickled under Karkat’s collar and his grip on the cane tightened. Even the floor tiles around him suddenly looked like they needed a chunk taken out of them. Aggression pumped through his veins, and he couldn’t place where it was coming from. Was there someone else here? Karkat—he felt eyes on him, _fuck_. It was like someone was looking right at him, snarling a death threat, but Karkat couldn’t see them coming. He reached for his sickles.   
  
…Yeah, maybe the best time to investigate would be: not with a broken leg. And while he was _actually armed_ (what the fuck was he even doing, leaving his weapons with John?). Shivering, Karkat began to retreat, quickly as he could. He didn’t know what he was feeling, but he trusted it. Paranoia was always right and John’s place was more secure.   
  
He passed a few trolls—but whatever it was, it wasn’t them. The dread just built higher. Hurry. Get away. Rushing now, he hauled open John’s door and pushed in. The idiot of his dreams was nowhere to be seen—  
  
—an in his was a female troll with hooked fangs and a grin she aimed Karkat’s way right off the bat. Expecting him.   
  
“Wait!” She called—Karkat damn well wasn’t that stupid—he had the doorknob. She grabbed his hand. Karkat stopped moving.   
  
Not because she was fast enough to catch him, but because she had grabbed his hand from directly in front of him. She stood between Karkat and the exit, hip cocked casually, hair billowing down to settle on her shoulders.   
  
That wasn’t just moving fast.   
  
“You’re Karkat, right?” The girl said. She was smirking. “John said you’d be coming.”   
  
Through his teeth, Karkat thought it wise to ask, “ _What in the fuck did you do with him?”_   
  
Okay, yeah, maybe those priorities were a little fucked, but Karkat felt like he was boiling over. The girl yelped and let go of his hand, raising her claws towards his face. “Ouch, hey! Don’t heat up like that, you meanie! They just called him in!”   
  
“ _Who?_ ” Karkat demanded shortly, not the faintest clue about what she was saying except that it wasn’t _oh okay, let me just get him for you_.   
  
“The sorceroars? Duh?” The strange girl was giving Karkat a flat look. “Wow, you’re jumpy. Don’t be such a spaz. He’s got work to do; he can’t just sit around with your butt all night.”   
  
“Work,” Karkat repeated. Terror was drumming his bloodpusher meat against his ribs. “What work?” The troll girl’s mouth made an ‘o’.   
  
“Sheesh, John,” she muttered under her breath, and retreated from Karkat’s space a little.   
  
Nothing about her body language telegraphed violence, Karkat noted. If she’d wanted to hurt him, she’d have done it already. She could teleport. Why would she toy with him?   
  
Yes, good, but _where was John?_   
  
“Of course he has work,” she told Karkat. “He’s an idiot, of course, but he’s an idiot for the glory of the Empire. And he sent you his most trusted lieutenant to escort one Karkat Vantas safely to a convalescence cell!” She dipped a curtsy with the folds of her impressive black skirt. When all Karkat did was stare, her shoulders slumped a little. “That’s me, dummy. A little respect?”   
  
Karkat was still combing through her phrasing. “You’re telling me that John has _lieutenants?_ ” So apparently he wasn’t really a janitor for the glory of the Empire. Karkat tried to think of ways that psychotic friendliness and irreverent magic-use could benefit the Condescension and came up with chirpbug noises. What job could John smile his way through all night?   
  
Don’t even ask Karkat to imagine John without the smile and all his toes curling up in dismay about it, what are you, nuts?   
  
“Uh. Yeah?” Karkat just now realized this troll had an unusual set of ears. They were too high—perched at the top of her head, just outside the spiral of her horns. They flicked as he watched, furry and cupped like a woofbeast. He’d never seen anything like them—and he was staring, wasn’t he. The girl smirked like this meant she won. “I mean, he’s the head of the sorceroars?”  
  
…What the everfuck were the sorceroars? No—scratch that, Karkat was pretty sure of what the name implied, even if he’d never heard of them. John had said there were bunches of wizards like him.   
  
Karkat blinked, trying to get his head around it. John? Weird, grinning, everybody’s friend John? He was leading _an entire military division?_ What the EVERFUCK.   
  
—Wait. Hold that thought. Rewind.   
  
“But that would mean he’s a…” Karkat trailed off before he could get any further. His brain refused to complete the thought. This was not _possible_.   
  
“An army general, yes,” the girl said impatiently, and fiddled with one of her sleeves like the world had not just stopped turning. Apparently uninterested in continuing to discuss her superior, she thrust a hand out towards Karkat and beamed. “Whatever. So, I’m Jade Harley. Hi, Karkat!”   
  
Oh god, John had an entire division at his disposal.   
  
And he was teaching them to be _friendly_. Karkat’s whole world was a lie.


	15. Not His Usual Type

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because what is meeting one of your crush's buddies without lengthy discussions on every fling gone wrong, right?
> 
> Also, ha ha. You thought I was kidding about those fight scenes, didn't you. The best part is that right now, all the events in this story seem totally random.
> 
>  
> 
> _I will greatly enjoy weaving them all back together for you, my friends._

“You’re still thinking about John, aren’t you?” So observed Jade. Karkat was too horrified by John Egbert being in a position of power to answer.  
  
Oh god. All of those ‘friends’ of John’s weren’t friends—they were getting close to him for his power and authority. And John let them into his _hive_. He was going to get himself murdered.  
  
Wait, wait. John didn’t think… that was why _Karkat_ had warmed up to him, right? If anything, General John Egbert of the Wizardroars made Karkat want to run for the safety of the hills. Except for John’s _idiotic_ faith in others, all of whom were doubtlessly looking at him as the next rung in the echeladder. It made his bloodpusher ache with, oh fuck, the pity was making Karkat absolutely stupid. If he couldn’t take down the Empire for his own sake, there was _no way_ he could take it down for John’s. And just.  
  
Guard him. Keep him safe from his own idiotic self.  
  
Jade hauled off and punched Karkat in the shoulder.  
  
“MotherFUCKER,” Karkat growled, reeling back into the door while his arm went numb. Jade retracted her hand, smiling sweetly. She looked deeply harmless and she punched like a troll three times her size.  
  
“ _Hi Karkat_ ,” she said again, slower this time. “ _I’m Jade._ ” And then she held out the hand she’d punched him with, beaming.  
  
Okay. Karkat was going to reluctantly admit that John’s friendship training had not totally ruined this troll.  
  
He scowled and gave the troll girl’s hand a shake. “Hello, Jade,” he allowed, which made her flick her ears back and pump his arm hard enough that he was clinging to his walking stick.  
  
“Hi!” Jade said happily. “You’re a lot more likeable when you’re not being completely rude!”  
  
“Oh fuck you,” Karkat snapped back. “I wasn’t the one who resorted to physical altercation twice, in spite of my,” he realized with a level of glee that for the first time in his life, he actually had the opportunity to make sarcastic finger quotes at someone other than a ten foot shrieking arthropod. “’Allied’—and I _only_ use that term in the loosest sense available—status. You, Jade, are failing abysmally at this non-threat mission. I might just have to kill myself to ensure your immediate expulsion from whatever agency was pan-rotted enough to sign you on.”  
  
“Wow!” Jade bared her teeth at him, and slammed hands on either side of Karkat’s head. “You know, babysitting my dorky lusus-sibling’s _latest quadrant fling_ is not really among my many duties, Karkat! This is me, helping you both out of the kindness of my heart!”  
  
Karkat bristled right back at her with, “Oh god, spare me the disgusting practices of jointly raised grubs. No one here is asking for assistance, nookface. So you can go right ahead and teleport yourself to such a locale as might give _a flying fuck_.”  
  
Jade blinked at him. “Not John’s usual type, I see,” she said, which made Karkat’s blood boil over to the point where his retort came in the form of the troll girl yelping and stumbling back from his walking stick.  
  
He began at a reasonably calm volume, just sufficient to shake the rafters, “I DO NOT GIVE THE SLIGHTEST SOLITARY SHIT ABOUT—“  
  
His walking stick teleported into Jade’s hand. Karkat clawed at the wall and did his best not to fall over while she beamed at him widely, all traces of animosity gone. “You know what? I think I like you!”  
  
Karkat stared at her. He groaned. “Oh, not _you_ too.”  
  
“Not in a quadrant way, silly!” Jade exclaimed, and Karkat’s walking stick teleported back between his fingers. Karkat was getting a headache. “In the friend way.”  
  
That was exactly what Karkat had meant. Karkat’s eye twitched. “Don’t you fucking dare.”  
  
“Let’s see…” Jade leaned nearer. “I’m guessing you’re a pity fling, since he was so adamant about you needing to be walked to your hive door…” When she had thoroughly invaded his personal space, she squinted behind her glasses. “Hmm… he wasn’t pale flirting, I hope?”  
  
Karkat tried to keep a straight face. “Who would be pale for that dumbass?” Jade grinned. Karkat’s ears flattened themselves. “…Why?”  
  
“Because he and Dave have been doing this weird dance around the pile forever,” she told him. “Even though John gets some new pale hook-up pretty much once a perigee, none of them last cause Dave is always coming around and staking his claim.” Jade’s glared at Karkat all of a sudden. “How come you boys can’t ever work out your quadrant shenanigans like reasonable people?”  
  
“Hey, bite me,” Karkat said. He really wanted to get off this topic of conversation. It wasn’t quite as bad as asking about John’s quadrants while John was actually in the room, but it definitely had Karkat squirming. “Not pale for him anyway.”  
  
Jade lunged. This time Karkat managed to whip his walking stick between them. Just in time to be hugged. He died on the inside. “Awesome!” Jade declared. “For once John’s picked out a troll who won’t bore me to tears!” Karkat saw a tail. The troll had a tail. It was wagging.  
  
That was… different.  
  
Jade grinned and leaned back. “You’re going to like me too, of course.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” Karkat said, tone venomous. Jade just giggled.  
  
“Yup! I’m very likeable.” Ignoring his glare, Jade looped an arm around his shoulders and tugged him outside. “Let’s go for a walk, dear, tender Karkat. I’ll tell you about John’s quadrants.”  
  
“If you call me that ever again, I will rip your spine out through your stomach and chronicle your screams on the walls in your blood,” Karkat offered. Jade cooed and patted his head between his horns.  
  
“John’s only got the caliginous quadrant filled.” Like Karkat hadn’t already called that one. John was too obnoxious to escape blackrom. “She’s the only quadrant he hasn’t vacillated on once. Vriska and John are serendipitous, I swear. No butting in!” Vriska, huh? It wasn’t exactly a common name, but Karkat couldn’t quite place it in this context. “Besides,” Jade added, “If you screwed with Vriska, she’d kill you!”  
  
Karkat looked up at Jade (there was not a troll in this complex who wasn’t taller than him) and swallowed. “You’re talking about Vriska Serket?” Jade’s smile was huge, and utterly evil. Karkat gaped. “ _Venomscourge_ Vriska?”  
  
“She’s really cool when you get to know her!” Jade told him. “I mean, yeah, all the tales of pillaging and sacking her way across the twelve seas. But she’s really good at roleplay too, and she knows all these party tricks!” She patted Karkat’s back. “I’m sure she’ll only give you a _liiittle_ bit of grief as John’s matesprit. Teensy-tinesy bit.”  
  
Wait, Karkat recognized this form of interaction. He narrowed his eyes at Jade. “You’re trying to chase me off.”  
  
Jade snickered. “And it’s fun.”  
  
“Let’s talk about something else,” Karkat suggested. Literally anything but the nautical terror of the Empire, already promised command of her own personal fleet as soon as she went to war. He’d grown up on stories of the Venomscourge. And she slummed it with John Egbert. General or otherwise, that seemed wrong on every conceivable level.  
  
“John’s pity flings only last a perigee or two,” Jade commented over Karkat’s head. “I’m rooting for you, though!”  
  
“You are not,” Karkat muttered. He had maybe thirty-two hours of life left (which, apparently, would have several hours less of John in them now, damn it). It wasn’t like he’d be getting any opportunity to deal with the Venomscourge.  
  
“I might, if you didn’t look like something the meowbeast yakked on the carpet,” Jade observed. When Karkat glared at her, she told him seriously, “It might help if you ate more than once a sweep. Or cut your hair. Or walked like a normal person. Also, do you know what ablutions are?” Karkat’s brows furrowed.  
  
“Me drowning you if you try it?”  
  
“I’ll give you a makeover later,” Jade decided, much to his horror. “See? I’m the nice one. Ask anybody.”  
  
It didn’t matter that Karkat was going to die anyway, that was a truly chilling prospect. “Oh god, there’s _more_ of you?”  
  
Jade patted his head again. “All of his friends have to regularly save John from himself and his terrible quadrant decisions.”  
  
Well, fuck.  
  
Obviously, in Jade’s envisioned future, Karkat had already lost the battle and would be tossed aside like so much garbage. It wasn’t like Karkat would live long enough to be a disappointment, though. Maybe, if Karkat was lucky, he’d see John again before he was culled.  
  
(Please let him be that lucky).  
  
“Hey.” Karkat squinted warily at Jade. He was not in the mood to get punched again. “I’m kind of messing with you, okay? I wouldn’t be telling you this if there was no hope. Don’t make that face.”  
  
The return of his scowl was instantaneous.  
  
“I appreciate you trying to crush my misguided optimism,” Karkat snapped back. “But _maybe_ you could lay the fuck off before I even manage to humiliate myself stammering some approximation of a heart at him?”  
  
“Don’t be dumb,” Jade retorted. “I’m telling you so you can do something about it, Karkat, duh! You might actually be worth flushing for, if we can chisel you out of all this dirt.” As Karkat bared his teeth, she added, “Also, John hasn’t been able to shut up about you for the past two days—it’s all Karkat this, Karkat that—so consider this informational assistance.” Jade tilted her head. “I kind of want you to make him swoon! And by ‘kind of’, I mean ‘really’, because you’re pretty great.”  
  
“What, because I cursed at you until I ran out of air in my windpipe?” Karkat was not feeling terribly generous at the moment.  
  
“Because you went off like a foghorn and totally failed to mention these.” Jade plucked at the edge of one of her furry ears. There was a quirk to her smile that suggested this was unusual. “Didn’t call me a freak or a mutant. What can I say? I’m a simple troll. You played fair, Nubby.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” Karkat muttered, disbelieving. After a pause, “Don’t call me that.”  
  
“Really!” Jade insisted. “You wouldn’t believe how many trolls—“ She stopped talking.  
  
A split second later, Karkat felt it too.  
  
Pure, cold aggression, all his nerves jangling, and _there were eyes on him_.  
  
A keychain swung into Jade’s palm—a sword?—and with a crackle, the toy expanded into a broadsword big enough to stand over Karkat’s head. Jade spun them around, fingers curled immediately around her blade. She whipped it out with a chime of metal on metal. Karkat couldn’t see quite what it was—he heard two heavy chunks hitting the ground and Jade growling soft like a stalkbeast.  
  
“Uh-oh!” Jade exclaimed in sing-song, and then spun them again—a mysterious object came whizzing towards them. This time Karkat registered that it was some kind of metal sphere, lit up with red lines. Jade sliced it in half effortlessly, not pausing for a second to turn and hack through another. Karkat swung in her arms like a very useless dance partner. As he stared upwards, he discovered that Jade’s face was full of awed delight.  
  
“Karkat!” She exclaimed as she moved, barely even out of breath, “I think John was onto something when he said you needed an escort!”


	16. You and Your Damn Miracles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been pointed out to me that with so much of this written, I might as well finish this installment of the story when I have a minute. This is basically because this requires no effort whatsoever. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking I have any sense of responsibility.

Karkat’s blood ran colder. “Is this normal here?”   
  
“No,” Jade giggled. Her arm hooked over Karkat’s shoulders and flung them both out of the way of one of the spheres. It hit the wall and exploded in a shower of rubble and dust. Jade spun backwards, out of the way while Karkat was still choking for breath. “ _Definitely_ not,” the troll girl said, and her sword vanished away. Another charm on her bracelet glowed green—grew into a lethal spear before Karkat’s eyes. “In fact, I’m not certain this has much to do with you at all?”   
  
Karkat, heartbeat slamming in his ears, a million illegal blood cells winding their way underneath his skin, thought she might be somewhat misinformed about that.   
  
“Anyway, there’s really not much you can do here,” she observed, and smoothly deflected another sphere with a spin of her new spear. “I think it might better if we revise the whole walking you home plan?”   
  
“Do you want me to distract them?” Karkat asked. He could still move pretty fast with his leg like this, probably. He could make it happen. He could push himself. He just needed to figure out where the attacks were coming from, because they just seemed to show up exactly where he thought they wouldn’t.   
  
“No, I want you to get lost,” Jade told him, and let out a snarl. She pushed Karkat against a wall and her hands blurred, sending shrapnel whirling around them, away. Karkat covered his face against the rubble. His eyes blinked open when there was not so much as a tap and he realized they were standing in the middle of a green bubble. Jade’s eyes were blazing with verdant fire, and Karkat suddenly questioned how much of her eye color was her own. Maybe she wasn’t an adult any more than he was.   
  
“Go,” she said, and flicked her wrist down the hall. Karkat understood instantly. The dust would be easy to vanish into, like a smokescreen. “I can handle this if I don’t have to take care of you. Find John and tell him that I _think_ I may have a lead on the disappearance case.”   
  
And then she was gone, leaping into the swirling clouds. Karkat didn’t even have the chance to argue, futile though it would have been. John had his sickles. His walking stick wasn’t going to be deflecting any solid steel bombs. So instead he threw himself in the opposite direction of the sorceroar lieutenant and moved as soundlessly though the dust as he could manage. Infirmary? Yes, that was his best option. He’d contact Tavros and get Jade’s message passed along. That would do just fine.   
  
Fuck, the urge to cough was overpowering. Jade’s smokescreen was clogging his lungs. She sounded like she was doing well in the fight behind him, so the least Karkat could do was not fuck up his escape by making stupidly unnecessary sounds. His chest convulsed.   
  
Nope. Coughing was for grubs.   
  
In retrospect, it might have been better to cough a little. He wasn’t paying attention to that sense of being watched, so his only warning that something was wrong was a scream from behind him.   
  
High and pained. Jade.   
  
He spun around immediately, not even thinking a little—he had to get to her—and a rasping laugh echoed around him. Much closer than the sorceroar’s cry.   
  
Too close. Right on top of him close.   
  
Karkat didn’t get the opportunity to scream. Something solid and heavy crashed against his broken leg and buckled him to the floor. His thoughts went dead with pain. His mouth barely opened, and then he heard a voice.   
  
“Sleep, you shitblood trash.”   
  
A boot connected with his horn, shockingly hard. It snapped Karkat’s neck back and sent him rolling. A drain in his head opened up in the middle of the pain, and Karkat was gone.   
  
0000  
  
Consciousness blinked back on like a faulty electrical grid. Ugh, ow. His right horn felt like a loose tooth, aching like it would fall out. Hurt. His leg was—had someone lit it on fire? He couldn’t see anything. Couldn’t get his eyes open. Or—no. They were open. Everything was just dark?   
  
All Karkat wanted to do was curl back into John and go back to sleep. He couldn’t move right, though. And John smelled weird. His shoulder was digging into Karkat’s waist. Were they going somewhere?   
  
Karkat rallied his efforts to give a disoriented grunt of protest. He didn’t want to be carried. He could walk by himself.   
  
God, everything hurt. What was _wrong_ with him?   
  
John ignored his mumbling. Karkat blinked his eyes a little, trying to squint. This wasn’t John’s hive, was it…? Was he in the infirmary after all? It felt like his splint had maybe… failed…   
  
Failed a _lot_. Past the fog, that was an impressive extent of pain.   
  
Karkat flexed his claws towards the limb and stopped short. Huh. Something… had twisted around his wrists… He couldn’t get it off, oh shit, _oh shit_.   
  
Majorly, massively, there’s-the-fan-right-over-there _shit_. Karkat stilled immediately, curling his claws to feel along his wrists—and there, yep, he had some kind of thin, stiff wire looping them together. When he tested it, he stopped short almost instantly. Those wires would slice him into an upholstery tassel before he managed to snap them. He was bound, and beyond that, he could also vaguely remember getting his ass handed to him.   
  
He couldn’t quite remember the details, but clearly he needed to spend the rest of his undoubtedly very short life kicking himself for it. Yes, Karkat, fuck up the one punch-up that ends with you being tied up and dumped over someone’s bony shoulder. How he’d mistaken this guy for John, there was no telling. The smell was all wrong. He had not the faintest fucking clue who this troll was, but here’s a hint: tied up and being hauled through the darkness was not the beginning of some civil _fucking_ introduction. The royal complex was pretty much the worst possible place for Karkat to have dragged his sorry skin except nope, lookie here, _an improvement_!   
  
The arm looped around his waist hitched him a little higher—Karkat clicked his teeth and swallowed a shriek of pain. His leg swung, thudding limply against the troll’s back. It didn’t feel like a leg anymore; it felt like a balloon full of knives. Fuck.   
  
If he puked, though, at least it would get all over this dude.   
  
Karkat couldn’t recall any polite introductions following his getting clubbed in the horns, so he decided that from now on, this guy’s name was going to be Slimewad Fucknugget. He smelled like the sopor glop, and also like someone Karkat really wanted to strangle, because of bounce, bounce—hello, blazing agony. You have not been missed.   
  
For the record, Karkat was also pretty sure getting his horns cracked hadn’t damaged his vision. His ears didn’t tell him much. There were weird, directional echoes—they were walking through tunnels, maybe, or weirdly shaped hallways. There was no light to see with. Trapped in dark, unfamiliar territory, with only Slimewad Fucknugget and his pals, whose footsteps plodded along behind Karkat. He counted three or four pairs of feet. The footsteps echoed a little bit. Wherever this was, it was big. It would be easy to get lost in.   
  
Dammit, this was bad.   
  
His head was swimming already, threatening to lapse into nothingness again. A concussion? Irrelevant. Whatever it was, Karkat handled it. He didn’t have time to sit around idly and die. What he needed to be doing was tracking where these other trolls were in space. If he could pinpoint them, he stood a chance of making a run for it. There were a lot of tunnels he could duck into and hide in.   
  
Hey, better to be lost in the dark than lost in the dark with three Alternians.  
  
Karkat was increasingly sure he only heard two other footsteps trailing along with Slimewad Fucknugget. He could…   
  
Shit, he couldn’t keep his eyes open. Dammit.   
  
No. No, keep _awake_. No. KEEP—   
  
He got sucked back down into soundlessness. He drifted.   
  
0000  
  
A voice drifted into his ears and banged around until Karkat paid attention to it. Male, and talking too fast to do much other than give Karkat a headache.   
  
And his name was Bulgepox Oozelips.  
  
“—Is Kaizer back yet? Need those supplies—“ Faded out. God _dammit_. Karkat’s ears roared.   
  
A low growl burst right next to his ear. Ah. Slimewad Fucknugget, was it? His words reminded Karkat of a dripping faucet; paused in weird places and liquid. Karkat’s heart raced, and he managed to eke words out of the vortex of sound. “—provided for us.”   
  
“You and your damn miracles.” Another voice, female; so that was at least three enemies. Her voice was lazy and trilling with amusement. Let’s call her Shitstick Gigglepan.   
  
“We found ourselves the princess, didn’t we?” Fucknugget purred. Karkat tensed as a claw scraped over his back, where he was slung across the other troll. He didn’t get cut. Slimewad Fucknugget’s claws skidded away and Karkat tried not to give himself up by shivering. “And here we’ve got our key to the real magic, boys and girls. One officer of the rebellion wrapped up to go.”   
  
Karkat’s ear twitched. Officer of the _what now_? What rebellion was this, the one where Karkat charged at the Imperial forces and got shot repeatedly?  
  
Shitstick Gigglepan laughed shrilly. “That was just dumb luck, Gam. That piece of shit looks like he was put through a meat grinder. The real issue is that we lost the witch. She’s bound to be running off squealing as we speak, and then they’re going to be all over our asses.”  
  
Witch?  
  
Green eyes lit up inside his head. _Jade_ , thought Karkat. Something stretched tight in him snapped like elastic and left it impossible to move. Fuck. He’d heard her scream. He didn’t want to think that…   
  
But they said they’d lost her. She’d gotten away? At least she wasn’t fucking trussed up and useless like some people in this area. Thank fucking Jegus. Karkat hoped she was miles away.   
  
Because. Because, he couldn’t afford to worry. Couldn’t be bothered. She was annoying anyway.   
  
“Naw, it’s miracles,” Slimewad Fucknugget said knowledgeably, low voice hauling Karkat out of his thought again. “How many times do I have to tell you? We let the witch go ON PURPOSE. Needed someone to carry our holy message on. Straight-up miracle. Same as him being up and awake now, eh, brother?” A claw swiped at Karkat again. “Come on and squeak your hellos.”


	17. Concussion Discussion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fuck it, let's just sprint for the finish line. Bet I can get this sucker off my computer by November. Mwahaha, life goals.
> 
> WARNING: Violence. Squeamish people back away. And this is _not_ a decent fight; this is more of an epic beatdown. 
> 
> But ha, it's not like it'll get worse, right?
> 
> Toodles.

Karkat gritted his teeth tried to be dead weight.   
  
Fucknugget’s voice was puzzled. “Oh? Too funny. Thought he woke up just a minute ago…”  
  
“Lemme take a crack at ‘im,” Bulgepox Oozelips gleefully announced.   
  
_Shit_ , Karkat thought— a crack hit the air, and his broken leg exploded.   
  
Tire iron? Socket wrench? Whatever it was, it ripped the scream out of him. Karkat’s mouth wouldn’t close because he _couldn’t_ , god, how was he going to just stand to lie there and be hurt like _that_?   
  
Bulgepox was laughing his fucking head off while Fucknugget stumbled, making the slamming pain in Karkat’s leg that much worse. Karkat ran out of air and his scream shriveled up. “Warn a brother if you’re gonna take swings,” Fucknugget was complaining. “Gotta be all braced and shit, or I’ll drop this loudmouthed corpsebucket…”   
  
“Duly noted,” Bulgepox agreed in a sneering voice. “Okay, warning!”   
  
And the troll holding Karkat stopped moving, heels bracing against rock—   
  
Shit. NO.   
  
Karkat slung his working leg back. His foot connected with something and he thrashed, battering it off of him. He couldn’t tell if the curses filling the air were coming out of his mouth or his victim’s, but only one of them hit the ground. Fucknugget cursed, holding him up, and Karkat snapped his teeth down and tore. Blood spilled between his teeth.   
  
This time he hit the ground. He landed on his leg. His thinkpan went up in a shower of sparks.   
  
Aptly enough, Shitstick Gigglepan was still laughing. “Goddamn,” she wheezed between giggles. “He really is some kind of feral, isn’t he? Maybe you scrambled his brains, clocking those nubs, Gam.”   
  
“What? Naw.”   
  
Karkat curled over his injured leg. _Come near me and I kill you._ His mouth wouldn’t move enough to say it. Karkat whipped his leg at Fucknugget’s voice clumsily. He was beginning to feel confused about where he was in space. Probably not a good sign. “Nothing but a tap… such a… tough little guy…?” Stone scuffed. Karkat was hearing too many footsteps to make sense. Growls tore out of his throat like things being hatched.   
  
His hearing came back enough to hear Fucknugget observe, “Ain’t that right?”   
  
A hand slapped down on the top of his head, near enough to his damaged horn to send him ballistic. He slammed his heel out with all the force he had left. Heard a grunt of pain, and tried to do it again, like he could keep that up forever, and drill his way out of this shithole.   
  
The side of his head suddenly felt cold. There was a heavy pressure inside. He couldn’t hear anything anymore. The blow sent him flying.   
  
Karkat came to on the ground, with the side of his head feeling split open. He couldn’t tell if he was bleeding or not. It was definitely possible, but this fury could just as easily have been how much he wanted to kill these trolls for logical reasons. One of them was touching him.   
  
Karkat launched himself forward and snapped his fangs down. Screams barked through the air—oh, Oozelips again. Karkat’s favorite. Karkat hung on grimly until his mouth was full of sour blood. He would have torn the troll apart chunk by chunk and made a pile from his flesh.   
  
A hand closed around his throat.   
  
“I’ll break your neck,” said Gigglepan, silkily. “Right now, if you don’t let Rend go.”  
  
“Better play along, shitveins,” Fucknugget offered, sounding amused as Oozelips continued to shriek. “Fawnam means business, most days.”   
  
Her claws dug into his flesh. Karkat’s mouth opened automatically. He didn’t mean to let go, but the threat of his blood spilling made him scream, or almost, rasping impotent hatred. Another useless-as-shit growl. Oozelips whimpered and skittered away. Shitstick Gigglepan’s claws squeezed down—  
  
—and let go.   
  
Karkat breathed.   
  
“That’s a good lowblood,” she said. “You understand? No more fucking around, or I smash your pan in.”   
  
“If you’re good—“ Karkat snarled with miserable rage. The same bastard as before hoisted Karkat up like wet laundry. The enemy. They were all his enemy. Kill them all, the fuckers, put his sickles through their cartilage nubs. He’d do it. Take the Empire down…   
  
His hearing cut out. He came to again, no idea of how long he’d been out.  
  
Fucknugget was suggesting, “You’ll get to meet the princess and won’t that just be the best fucking miracle of all time?” Someone giggled. Probably not Oozelips, miserable little shitstain. Karkat could fuck the bastard up any day of the week and he hoped the mauled hand rotted.   
  
Everything hurt.   
  
_Kill you, I’ll kill you. Kill you all. Kill every one of them, these trolls, trolls, kill them._   
  
Behind them, it was declared sullenly, “Little fucker made me bleed. I get to kill him, and I want to do it _creatively_.”   
  
_Yeah? Just try it._ But Karkat’s thoughts were fuzzing out into emptiness again. He wasn’t passing out. He was exhausted, and defeated. There was no reason to stay in his damned skull.  
  
\----  
  
“…He dead?”   
  
This time the voice came from above Karkat. He tried to piece together why. He’d been dropped, right. He was somewhat conscious again, because the fall had driven him into a wall of unexpected physical agony. Must have landed on his leg, or maybe his horn.   
  
Karkat’s thoughts felt like a bubble, totally separate from his blood and bones. No fucking reason to put the world back together. His body felt like a pincushion anyway. Breathing was the most he wanted to accomplish, and he was doing a pretty admirable job of that, by god.   
  
“What the fuck does it matter?” Shitstick Gigglepan demanded. “He’ll be dead regardless. Let him rot.”   
  
_Fine_.   
  
The thought of killing them all in a whirlwind of vengeance had faltered away around the third time one of them had taken a swing at his leg. All Karkat wanted was for things to stop.  
  
Before they’d dropped him, John had been there. Magic fucking smiles. Karkat had built a pile after all, or he was just being hugged, maybe, surrounded by a tower of his arms and that smile and remembering to breathe really, really well. Did he have a concussion?   
  
“He’s not dead yet.”  
  
“And I’m asking you, Rendel, why do you care? God, just try for once not to wax black for the first rusted up excuse for a pail you bumble into on the street.”   
  
“Hey, fuck you, Fawnam! He doesn’t smell dead, and if we’re stuck down here with this menagerie of filth, I want to be entertained!” Karkat sighed. Smell?   
  
Yeah, sure, so this place reeked to high heaven. Why the hell did it matter?   
  
He wanted to go back to sleep.   
  
“You said we could make him and the princess go a few rounds! You _promised_!”   
  
“Ugh, really? You want to watch _that_?”  
  
“He ain’t dead.” A boot prodded into Karkat’s side. “Felt his bloodpusher goin’ when I was carrying him. Still sizzling fresh.” The boot prodded again. “Hey there. Up and at em, shitblood!”   
  
No thanks, he really would rather not. That was all the defiance he had left in him—pathetic exhaustion.   
  
Ha, if only John could see him now.   
  
He got kicked. Karkat rolled limply for a few feet. He couldn’t do anything to stop himself. He felt so _heavy_. “I want to see them go at it!” Bulgepox Oozelips insisted. “Feral boy and the princess! I want to see them fuck each other up!”   
  
“That’ll be the shortest fucking fight in the universe,” Gigglepan snorted. “What’ll he do, twitch on her?”   
  
Karkat was hauled up by the hair. His hearing had shorted out again, but he was aware that he was being dragged across the rocky floor. His neck wouldn’t bend much farther, and his leg was fragmenting with every chunk of rock it was yanked along. He couldn’t breathe. He raised a grunt of protest. “I can think of a good way to find out,” merrily observed Fucknugget. “Watch and learn, all you good little boys and girls, for you shall witness a miracle.”   
  
He’d stopped. Thank fuck. Karkat automatically opened his mouth to wheeze in a little air. The stink of this troll filled his throat and the air seemed to turn inside out.  
  
With his captor’s mouth right up against his ear, Karkat couldn’t hear the words so much as feel them vibrating through his bones. They converged into electricity between his ribs. He choked on the air he’d just inhaled. Felt his eyes widening. The pressure inside his skull increased to critical levels. His fingers twitched in their wires, and that was all the reaction he managed to give.   
  
It wasn’t like the words pushed him, or even took notice of the ears they slithered inside. There was just Karkat inside his head, and then being squeezed into a corner by a blind rage that didn’t belong to him anymore.   
  
It was so _much_ different from Zahhak’s.   
  
Karkat's legs straightened, for him. If he was hurt, he didn’t quite understand that anymore. His left leg just didn’t bend properly, and his arms were… gone. That was all. Claws unwound from his hair, letting him fall forward. He caught himself, hunched, and hobbled towards the croak of an opening gate. Someone shoved him forward. He tried to move faster.   
  
A door clanged shut behind him. Laughter too, following him in. Slapped high fives. Layers of sound, but not the one growl Karkat was straining for. In the air, he smelled an unfamiliar troll. He smelled tears.   
  
A ragged, frightened voice rose from somewhere in front of him. “Eqiuus—?”   
  
And Karkat moved to kill her like the highblood’s fucking growl had told him to do.


	18. Repent and Purify

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MOAR FIGHTING  
> I'm not totally happy with this fight scene, but I'm more interested in getting this story finished than finishing it well.  
> Aren't you glad about the total, definite, complete lack of cliffhangers?

Information clicked through Karkat’s thinkpan in sing-song. _Not fast. Am I strong?_  
  
 _Yes._   
  
He used his muscles as a fulcrum to whip himself at his quarry, slamming his shoulder into her. Karkat took them both down, and hunted her neck with his fangs. One good bite, and he’d have these echoes out of his head.   
  
_There’s a princess in this cage, and I want you to kill her._   
  
Yes, that was all Karkat existed for now.   
  
_Kill her, kill her, kill her_   
  
He snapped his teeth frantically, and discovered that the princess did have two working arms, and furthermore, two working legs. He was flung to the floor, and her snarl boiled in his ears. Claws snatched up two handfuls of Karkat’s hair—missed his horns—and slammed his face into the cage bars. They were as thick as Karkat’s wrist. Did it again. The crashing was loud, but the highblood was louder, and Karkat was IMPLODING.   
  
His skull rebounded into solid metal again, and he bit through his tongue. Blood filled his mouth. Karkat’s body twisted. His working leg crushed the air audibly out of her—the princess smashed the heel of her hand down on his throat and ground down. His airflow was gone. Karkat kicked at her again, ineffectual, blood pooling in his mouth.   
  
_Blood my blood cannot spill cannot look kill her kill her_  
  
 _There’s a princess in this cage_  
  
 _Kill her kill herkillherkillher_   
  
By sheer luck, Karkat had his leg wrapped around her waist and locked. He reared against her hand. Drove his windpipe harder into her grip. Princess yelped in confusion, finding herself getting dragged in, Karkat’s stomach muscles dragging him upright at the same time. The heat of her skin must have been inches from his gnashing fangs. He was stronger. He’d wash his blood out with hers.   
  
She let him go with a scream of frustration. Karkat used the cage bars to lever himself up. He heard her leg snap upwards, invisible in the dark except for a whisper of sound. He ducked.   
  
The princess must have been aiming for his neck to crush his windpipe altogether. She glanced off the side of his head. His senses went to static, and so Karkat rushed forward blindly. Impact. His feet skidded on the gritty floor. The princess clawed at him, but her claws weren’t sharp enough to break skin. She must not have been used to fighting. He was going to kill her. Swallowed more of his blood, felt like a fountain in his mouth ( _no stop can’t bleed don’t bleed kill)._   
  
_Kill her._   
  
She shoved away from his teeth. Spun around, slipping to his side.   
  
His hands wrenched against their bonds to sling an elbow up. Her jaw clicked with the blow, and she fell. He got his knee against her throat. Her claws scrabbled against Karkat’s pants leg, searching for skin to gouge. He leaned harder, snarling.   
  
_Kill her kill her kill her._   
  
The princess’s claws were weak as a mewbeast’s. _Kill her kill h_   
  
The slightest spark of light had him reeling back after so much darkness. The troll underneath him turned out to have a face. Bruised, tearstained cheeks pulled back into a warrior’s grimace, eyes burning like moonlight on golden tree leaves. Why were they glowing—?   
  
She jammed her claws into his eyes.   
  
Karkat sank, curling in by some reflex that not even the highblood growl could smother. Protect the fucking eyes, you will need those. The princess kicked him in the side—he couldn’t defend himself without arms—hard enough to smash him into the bars again. Drove her boot into his ribs.   
  
_Kill her_. What was he doing, lying here on the ground?   
  
Karkat struck her knee out from under her. Lunged.   
  
Again, they crashed together. His eyes were squeezed shut, aflame with whatever damage she’d done before he pulled back, mouth full of blood that she couldn’t see, knowing that she must have seen his hemochromatin because how else would this play out, it always did.   
  
_KILL HER KILL HER KILL HER_   
  
She slammed him into the ground. Karkat snapped up a mouthful of grit. Heaved them over. Spat it in her eyes. She screamed   
  
Rolled   
  
His fangs on her fingers, chewing down as she tried to keep him away   
  
Trolls laughing everywhere, watching him die, watching him bleed, _fucking_ Alternia   
  
Why did he have to   
  
He didn’t want   
And his fangs were sinking into her neck. Half a second, and hot blood spraying everywhere. Enough to conceal his own. Enough to.   
  
Enough to _kill her_.   
  
Karkat _wrenched_.   
  
She was crying. Her stupid claws couldn’t even scratch him. He heard the highbloods shrieking with amusement. He could feel her pulse in his teeth.   
  
_Kill_   
  
Hadn't he bitten yet?   
  
Karkat’s mind went blank as the growl of his superior sawed its way through.   
  
“That’s enough, don’t you agree?”   
  
And Karkat was a fucking light switch to be flipped. Click-click, and his mouth went slack against the princess’s flesh. There was no relief, just a new set of orders. “No more fighting, you two. Let’s all be getting along.”   
  
The princess heaved a shaking sob. Karkat was following suit. He struggled off of her just to flatten himself to the ground. Ears down, barely breathing, making himself as vulnerable as possible. Basic response—let me show you how much exactly, I defer to you. The most obedient person in this cage was the one who inhaled the most grit off the floor.   
  
His wrists burned in their bonds, his leg had surpassed the abilities of words to describe the sheer wrongness of itself, and every inch of skin was a shaking, sweat-drenched mess. Without being told to fight, all those things became Karkat again. His mouth and throat were coated with disgusting blood and the sick burning in his stomach like a nightmare.   
  
So this was the difference between Equius’s blue and… and whatever hemospectrum level that had been. Total, unquestioning deference.   
  
Being made into a different troll.   
  
Karkat’s eyes squeezed closed. He wanted to throw up until he’d burned the blood from his mouth, but.   
  
He couldn’t vomit. He hadn’t been given permission.   
  
“Yeah, that’s the way,” the highblood said approvingly. If he’d had the capacity for conscious thought, Karkat would have wanted to know how the highblood could see them. “I have not seen lowbloods knowing their place for the longest time.” The highblood’s voice suddenly swung deep, the growl pressing Karkat down harder. “YOUR KIND BELONGS IN THE FUCKING DIRT, SHITBLOODS.”   
  
The princess moaned softly. Karkat managed to bite back a whine of his own.   
  
“The way of the messiahs makes it plain.” The highblood’s footsteps melted out of the dark. Circling them. Showing them how big the cage was. Maybe eight feet wide. _Clamp-clump_. “I give my blood’s call and you bend a motherfucking knee to your betters. It’s how the world turns. None of this FUCKING EQUALITY SHENANIGANS. DESTABILIZING THE RIGHT FUCKING WAY OF THINGS.”   
  
“Shit belongs in the garbage,” the female troll said—Karkat couldn’t remember their names anymore. Her voice sounded like she was reciting from a book. “Don’t want your kind stinking up what’s ours, lowbloods.”   
  
“Better a carcass then a ruckus.”   
  
“The trolls that came before us understood what a lowblood was for since the dawn of time,” the ringleader started in again. “So why can’t you? Why you gotta run this world to the ground pretending you’re worth _a solitary damn_?”  
  
I’m worth nothing, Karkat wanted to say. But he hadn’t been given permission to speak. The princess moaned again, trying. She choked on it.   
  
“Then again,” the highblood went on, voice softening enough for Karkat to sigh in relief. “That the fault ain’t just in you two. This Empire is backwards. You shitbloods have been led astray by the highbloods too weak to take their rightful power. They have equal need for slit throats.”   
  
Karkat cringed.   
  
But Jade got away. They said she got away. She was fine.   
  
(Her scream echoed in his ears, high and terrified).  
  
She was _fine_.   
  
“Clean death,” he murmured, “Better than you MOTHERFUCKING BLASPHEMERS DESERVE. But nothing at all until you’ve served us first. The time of your use shall come soon, brothers and sisters.” The highblood’s laugh drove into Karkat’s skull like nails. “The witch will lead them right here, looking for their SINFUL FUCKING QUADRANTMATES.” He spat. “Those that transgress, taking scumbloods as clade kin, we’ll purify in blood. As they repent, your deaths too will be granted.”   
  
Quadrantmates?   
  
Beside Karkat, the princess was crying again. He couldn’t breathe. He was in his head, crouched in the prospective mess hall again, staring at Zahhak. Only no, that was evasion. That was stone-fucking-cold cowardice because Karkat didn’t have the slightest fucking connection to Zahhak, highblood or not. The mess hall, focus.   
  
Where John had been.   
  
Where Karkat had attacked John. And John hadn’t done shit back.   
  
Karkat’s stomach dropped out.


	19. Subtlety, By Karkat Vantas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a total rewrite. As such, that is why it should be shot to death with a variety of multiple caliber bullets. Also, self-esteem is only for the people who take the good drugs.
> 
> Anyway. After several chapters of me writing subpar fight scenes, aren't you glad for a subpar episode of dialogue and moderately necessary filler?
> 
> Eventually things will happen and they will be very thingsome, but today is not that day.

Who? Karkat?   
  
Spend a significant portion of his coherent hours obsessing over a complete waste of skin? God, Karkat needed to do the exact opposite of get a life.   
  
Sure.   
  
John, the idiot who didn’t _want_ to kill his friends. The troll so emotionally stunted he didn’t get mad when he was insulted, who would rather tickle an invalid as cut his throat. John, of the—dammit. _Pillow fights_. Pillow fights! Absolutely lethal claws on him, and he just—   
  
He was just not a part of Karkat’s Alternia.   
  
Karkat sucked in a little air and choked on it.  
  
The good news? The hypnotic thrum of the highblood’s growl had been pulled back at last. Bad news? Coming back into his own flesh reminded Karkat that his freak blood had been replaced with rusty nails.   
  
The douche-in-charge had rounded off their evening of feelings caring-sharing and therapeutic murder attempts by giving some shitty advice about how lowbloods could pray for salvation. He’d progressed to making bets with his fucking cronies about which would die first, Karkat or his cagemate. There was a part of Karkat that wanted to just screech laughter. He’d come to the capitol. On _purpose_.   
  
You know, he would have fought a thousand sweeps for the asshole and he would have lost EVERY SINGLE TIME. And if Jade had been overcome, what chance did Karkat’s stupid, grinning flushcrush have?   
  
God, it didn’t matter what training he had, or what delusion he’d entertained. He got it now. He was already dust. But John didn’t have to be, so come on, universe, get with the fucking program. Karkat had signed up for this.   
  
But please, John _never_ had.   
  
“Make a real production if you order the princess to kill him,” the female was adding. “She can do better.”   
  
“Yeah, might do,” the highblood agreed. “Gotta say, hardcore kinda show. But can bump it up for Messiahs’ own glory?”  
  
To Karkat’s left, the princess let out a rumbling growl through her tears.   
  
“Sure as shit,” another laughed.   
  
“Yeah, let’s get the wicked show rolling. Oh feral boy,” the highblood called in sing-song, “You come over here, and show me those tangled-up claws.”  
  
The only good thing about this cage was that it put some distance between them, but Karkat’s head was already sinking. He’d been commanded. There was nothing to do but drag himself up. Karkat limped until he was sagged against the cage bars, forehead jammed against the cold, trying to keep himself from flying apart. A ragged, weak fucking sound pulled itself out of his throat at the highblood’s approach. Begging the highblood to spare him. _Delightful_.   
  
“Said turn around, didn’t I? Slide right up against the bars, yeah, there you go.” Karkat had barely leaned back when claws raked lightly down his throat, and Karkat had the choice between biting his mouth bloodier or chirping his submission again.   
  
Fuck. Fuck everything. His stomach churned as the highblood laughed. Well, maybe if he couldn’t lash out while his blood was being spilled, it would be over. Would the pressure of screaming build behind his eyes until he popped like rotten fruit? Before he could learn, Karkat’s hands fell to his sides. The pressure of the wires had disappeared. They’d been cut.   
  
His numb fingers flexing out automatically. Blood. Blood, blood, blood, and John. Had whatever night vision this guy had let him see Karkat’s blood color? His wrists had to be shredded.   
  
_Did it even_ matter _? Come off it, Karkat._ “Best not fall to dreaming, now,” the highblood whispered into his ear. Karkat stayed flat against the bars hard enough to hurt. The compulsion wouldn’t let him go so easily. “Like I said, don’t want none of you up and dying just yet.”   
  
He shoved Karkat forward. Karkat caught himself on his hands. The princess greeted him with a low, threatening growl.  
  
“Way to go, Gamzee,” said one of his captor sourly—ah, no. That was Bulgepox Oozelips, wasn’t it? “Take all the fun out of my life, why don’t you?”   
  
“Knock it off, Rendel,” grumbled Gigglepan. “Gam’s right. If we’re gonna be stuck watching this menagerie of bilgebloods, might as well get some quality fights, not some lameass corpse savaging.”  
  
“ _I’d_ like to savage the feral’s fucking corpse,” Oozelips growled back.   
  
“Righteous,” Fucknugget agreed. “If he gets too close to the bars, you go right ahead and do that. First watch is all yours, brother.”   
  
The footsteps started to file out. The princess was snapping her fangs in Karkat’s direction repeatedly. No sleeping, Karkat’s sophisticated social skills confirmed. Karkat felt roughly as dangerous as a couple of tin cans duct taped together and he was bleeding mutated sludge all over the place. The real prize was how he had been lied to his entire life about his chances of unseating the imperial highbloods with their fucking unfair mind control, but that was fine, that was okay, he’d probably have gotten culled any fucking way.   
  
His hands were free and Karkat sucked ass at playing dead.   
  
\----   
  
The watch had exchanged twice while Karkat was sitting in the dark, drifting between surges of pain. This whole thing, Karkat had determined, was bullshit. With all their tender snugglebrunches, mind-numbing terror and Karkat were practically pale for each other. Karkat had been scared all his shitty life. His comfort zone with pants-shitting despair _extensive_.   
  
Being so cripplingly afraid for someone you couldn’t even see was _bullshit_. He needed to think. He could not keep zeroing in on John’s imagined dumbass grin.  
  
If he’d just been afraid for himself, like usual, it wouldn’t be so—   
  
“Seriously, if you so much as breathe on my side,” the princess reminded him in an unbidden snarl, “Truce is over and our captors have one less corpse to worry about.”   
  
Right. This time, presumably because Karkat didn’t open his mouth to concur, he didn’t get another rock kicked at his head.   
  
The flow of his thoughts had warped strange with darkness and fear. You know, because Karkat’s thoughts were already in such great condition with his thinkpan damage on one hand and on the other, the blood leaking from his veins, driving another spasm of rage through his skull each time he noticed. Location, he tried again, painfully. _Think. What clues to you have?_   
  
_Subterranean._  
  
 _…Maybe?_ It was fucking dark and there had been gravelly rocks. What else did that?  
  
God, right now it was looking like either he developed psiionics in the next five hour period or he had to use his words. He needed a baseline of information to act. Shuddering, Karkat dragged a hand through his hair. If John had been in here—   
  
_Christ, Vantas, do you keep your globes around for anything useful, or did you just need a fucking party hat? Quit thinking. Open your mouth and at least_ try _. That way, when you fail and get your throat slit, you can be self-satisfied._  
  
Little things.   
  
“Hey,” he called into the darkness. “Equius.”   
  
“Do you want me to kill you,” the princess responded genially.   
  
“I saw Equius today,” Karkat blurted in Alternia’s least graceful attempt to convert battle tactics into resourceful thinking. “Or—it might have been yesterday. I don’t know how long I was out for.” Total blackout silence. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Desperately, Karkat croaked, thinking of John, what would he want to hear about John—“He looked good. You know, healthy and shit.”   
  
“…They must be keeping my kidnapping a secret from him, I guess.”   
  
Karkat blinked. “What, you’re important?”   
  
As the princess growled, Karkat reflected that he could have phrased that better. Also: THIS WAS WHY HE DIDN’T TALK TO TROLLS.   
  
“Oh right, because you’d know, midget,” the princess snapped his way, “If I wasn’t around, there’s no way Equius could stay calm. That’s what moirails are for. They keep each other calm! So yeah, he needs me.” Her breath sped up and her voice shook as she added, “Cause highbloods freak out _all the time_.”  
  
Her voice cracked. Karkat’s throat gently constricted to the size of a drinking straw.   
  
“I just want my moirail,” the princess whispered and both of Karkat’s hands were up like he was trying to ward off an attack. After a moment, he realized what he was going to do.   
  
Oh god. This was the worst possible decision. And why was he going to die repeating to himself that his shameglobes were not a party hat?   
  
She was shaking just as bad as he was, Karkat noticed. The princess’s shoulder went still when he placed his hand against it. He spastically worked air into his lungs until words came out. “Your moirail is a creepy-ass olfactory nightmare of a troll.” Karkat told her. “But, uh, you’re not going to watch him die.” The alternative was more crying. “So then, okay.”   
  
There was silence after his declaration, but the princess’s claws stayed back. Karkat chanced another breath.   
  
“Okay?” The princess repeated. Then she scoffed. “What is this, classic film scripts: the schoolfeeding?” Karkat coughed a little (his movies were excellent) and without warning, his cagemate reverted back to growling. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait just a second. Are you trying to _hit on me_?”   
  
Karkat’s hand whipped away so fast he probably achieved a small, mid-air vacuum. “No!” _I’m trying to pump you for information_ , except Karkat was fairly certain directly stating his intentions was going to screw him over. “Alliances! Make one!”   
  
“An alliance,” the princess repeated, incredulous.  
  
Literally anything but this conversational topic would be an improvement. “What’s your name?” Karkat demanded, officially reduced to the basic discussion topics of a freshly pupated grub.   
  
Freshly pupated grubs never got accused of hitting on anyone ever, and it was glorious.   
  
“Oh no,” the princess said, and elbowed Karkat in the chest. “No names. Whatever moves you are trying, this is just not happening. You can call me whatever and—“   
  
“Oh for Mother Grub’s sake!” Karkat exploded, throwing his hands up. “Fuck this subtlety shit! Do you know where we are or don’t you?!”


End file.
